Intelligence CATV - Traffic models, design and analysis

The areas of television, telecommunication, and information technology are converging, new application areas are arising and new services are being established. Aside from the traditional delivery channels, computer networks play an increasing role in providing the new services. Cable is a natural network for carrying high-capacity, bandwidth - intense information. The introduction of the Open Computer Network (OPN) providing Internet like services, will lead to higher-level demands by users. For example, users will be asking for higher quality, greater functionality, and lower charges for high-speed, high-throughput data transfer. Traffic models are at the heart of any performance evaluation of CATV networks. An accurate estimation of network performance is critical for the success of broadband networks. Such networks need to guarantee an acceptable quality of service (QoS) level to the users, Therefore, traffic models need to be accurate and able to capture the statistical characteristics of the actual traffic. When designing and configuring an ATM / based broadband CATV (B-CATV), it remains difficult to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) for different service classes, while still allowing enough statistical sharing of bandwidth so that the network is efficiently utilized. These two goals are often conflicting. Guaranteeing QoS requires traffic isolation, as well as allocation of enough network resources (e.g. buffer space and bandwidth) to each call.