Operators are continuing to enhance their service mix with more personalized content, solutions that deliver the content to multiple screens, and doing so at accelerated deployment speeds. These objectives, among others, have driven plans to evolve the cable infrastructure towards an end-to-end IP architecture. Cable’s IP pipe on the access network is, of course, the DOCSIS platform.
However, the origins of DOCSIS were not developed with video services in mind. That has changed with DOCSIS 3.0. Nonetheless, supporting video requires the revisiting of traffic engineering principles used on today’s DOCSIS access links.