Evaluation of the DOCSIS upstream

Students: Swapnil Bhatia and Chaitanya Godsay
Collaborator: Steven Fulton (UNH InterOperability Laboratory)
Faculty: Radim Bartoš

A DOCSIS network uses the existing cable television infrastructure to deliver data services to subscribers. The network, owing to the structure of the pre-existing cable television plant, forms a tree with the root connected to a Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS). Subscribers connect to the network through a cable modem (CM) connected as a leaf of the tree. The link from the CMTS to CM, termed as downstream, is point-to-multipoint broadcast, whereas the upstream from the CM to CMTS is a multipoint-to-point time-division multiplexed link arbitrated by the CMTS. We characterize the performance of the upstream channel of a DOCSIS network in terms of throughput and channel utilization and study the effect of two protocol parameters on upstream performance.

This project is a part of our broader effort on the design and evaluation of access networks.

Peer-reviewed publications:

  • S. Bhatia, R. Bartoš and C. Godsay, ``Empirical Evaluation of Upstream Throughput in a DOCSIS Access Network,'' in Proc. of the IEEE Conference on Multimedia Services Access Networks, Orlando, FL, June 2005. [PDF 123K]
  • R. Bartoš, C. Godsay and S. Fulton, "Experimental Evaluation of DOCSIS 1.1 Upstream Performance" in the Proc. of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Networks Innsbruck, Austria, Feb. 2004. [PDF 68K]
  • S. Fulton, C. Godsay, and R. Bartoš, ``DOCSIS as a Foundation for Community Networking over Hybrid Fiber Coax,'' Proc. of the First International Workshop on Community Networks and FTTH/P/x (CNFT), Dallas, TX, October 2003.

Book chapter:

  • S. Fulton, C. K. Godsay, and R. Bartoš, ``DOCSIS as a Foundation for Residential and Commercial Community Networking over Hybrid Fiber Coax,'' in Broadband Services: Business Models and Technologies for Community Networks, Imrich Chlamtac, Ashwin Gumaste, and Csaba Szabo (eds.), John Wiley & Sons, April 2005.

Support:

This project was supported in part by the UNH InterOperability Laboratory.