PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF QOS OVER CATV NETWORKS BASED ON THE EUROPEAN CABLE MODEM PROTOCOL (DVB/DAVIC) FOR THE SUPPORT OF DELAY- SENSITIVE APPLICATIONS

This paper presents an overview of some key QoS features that will enable the DVB/DAVIC protocol with a superior performance and efficiency at the Media Access Control (MAC) layer for the support of delay-sensitive applications. We show the deficiencies of the basic reservation request mechanism provided by the DVB/DAVIC MAC protocol and present a performance optimisation via simulation results in terms of mean packet access delay and system throughput. Initial results show that the number of delay sensitive streams supported can be increased considerably by considering QoS features. I