A priority scheme for the IEEE 802.14 MAC protocol for hybrid fiber-coax networks

In order to support quality-of-service (QoS) for real-time data communicati ons such as voice, video and interactive services, multiaccess networks mus t provide an effective priority mechanism. The context of this work is the IEEE 802.14 standard for hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) networks which has a sh ared upstream channel for transmissions from stations to the headend. This work presents a multilevel priority collision resolution scheme, which sepa rates and resolves collisions between stations in a priority order, thereby , achieving the capability for preemptive priorities, We present a set of s imulation scenarios which show the robustness and efficiency of the scheme, such as its ability to isolate higher priority traffic from lower prioriti es and to provide quick access to high-priority requests. In March 1998, a framework for handling priorities in the collision resolution process, whic h adopts a semantics similar to the semantics of our scheme, was included i n the 802.14 standard.