By Bruce Thompson, Xiaomei Liu
To offer more services to end users in the cable network, bandwidth needs at the edge of HFC network are growing rapidly. The industry is moving from current architecture where each service has its own edge resources to a multi-service universal edge architecture to use the RF bandwidth more efficiently.
This paper will go into detail on the benefits of dynamically sharing resources across services. It will also describe a control/data plane architecture that can be used to share resources between these services. Lastly, this paper will provide examples of standardized protocol suites that can be used to implement the interface between the components of a distributed architecture that supports resource sharing across services.