Evaluation of Allocation Policies on Hybrid Fiber-Coax Broadband Access Networks for Contention-Type Traffic

Networks with centralized access mechanisms, e.g. HFC 802.14, are specified by a set of standards that in most cases does not cover internal operations of the central station, called Head-End Controller (HC) in HFC 802.14 networks. An example of this sort of operations could be the manner in which the HC allocates resources for contention-type traffic. In this paper we study two types of policies that the HC could use to allocate this kind of traffic. In both cases, we obtain computationally efficient analytical expressions of the mean Contention Resolution Period (CRP) using the methods described in [9] for a Q-ary resolution algorithm. Also we define two parameters of evaluation that in conjunction with the computations of the CRP could help to the HC to look for the best policy.