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A novel mechanism for contention resolution in HFC networks

The Medium Access Control (MAC) scheme proposed by DAVIC/DVB, IEEE 802.14 and DOCSIS for the upstream channel of Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) access networks is based on a mixable contention-based/contention-less time slot assignment. Contention-less slots are assigned by the head end to end stations according to a reservation scheme. Contention-based slots are randomly accessed by active terminals without any preliminary allocation, so that collisions may occur. To resolve contention, the contention tree algorithm has been widely accepted by the DVB/DAVIC, IEEE 802.14 and DOCSIS standards for MAC because of higher throughput and lower access delay. In this paper we propose a novel contention resolution mechanism and compare its performance with that of existing procedures. The proposed procedure is termed as static arrival slot mechanism. In this mechanism, one slot in each frame is exclusively reserved for new arrivals that wish to access the channel using contention resolution, and at least one slot is reserved for resolving their contention if there was one in the arrival slot. The performance of the proposed mechanism is evaluated through analysis and simulation. The results show that the proposed mechanism outperforms existing contention resolution procedures under heavy traffic.