Implementation of an efficient transport for real-time game applications on HFC cable networks

On HFC cable networks, in order to develop a real-time game application, we face a design problem to efficiently transmit packets with reliability. This paper introduces the SCRA (server-based collision resolution and avoidance) scheme. SCRA is a reliable transport method using UDP for real-time applications on HFC networks. In this design, we first analyze the collision probability, and estimate the required throughput on an upstream contention channel. SCRA controls the packet delivery, de-correlates the traffic bursts, and maintains a stable throughput for the application. The simulation shows that SCRA achieves ideal transmission time and bandwidth utilization. We also give the formulae to derive the parameters for a specific real-time application using SCRA.