DYNAMIC CHANNEL ASSIGNMENT IN INTEGRATED-SERVICES CABLE NETWORKS

Cable networks can offer a variety of video services such as video-on-demand, video conferencing, videotex, and real-time monitoring, besides broadcasting TV programs. These services can be extended when optical fibers, equipping tremendous bandwidth, are used to carry the traffic. Most of the newer cable systems are indeed using fibers as the distribution media. In this paper we propose a dynamic channel assignment strategy for an integrated-services cable system. The strategy allows the dynamic sharing of channels among the three types of video traffic: the real-time traffic, the broadcast traffic and the delayable traffic. Simulation results show that it can greatly increase the channel utilization without affecting service requirements.