Design and Performance Analysis of Functional Split in Virtualized Access Networks

abstract: Emerging modular cable network architectures distribute some cable headend functions to remote nodes that are located close to the broadcast cable links reaching the cable modems (CMs) in the subscriber homes and businesses. In the Remote- PHY (R-PHY) architecture, a Remote PHY Device (RPD) conducts the physical layer processing for the analog cable transmissions, while the headend runs the DOCSIS medium access control (MAC) for the upstream transmissions of the distributed CMs over the shared cable link. In contrast, in the Remote MACPHY (R-MACPHY) ar- chitecture, a Remote MACPHY Device (RMD) conducts both the physical and MAC layer processing. The dissertation objective is to conduct a comprehensive perfor- mance comparison of the R-PHY and R-MACPHY architectures. Also, development of analytical delay models for the polling-based MAC with Gated bandwidth alloca- tion of Poisson traffic in the R-PHY and R-MACPHY architectures and conducting extensive simulations to assess the accuracy of the analytical model and to evaluate the delay-throughput performance of the R-PHY and R-MACPHY architectures for a wide range of deployment and operating scenarios. Performance evaluations ex- tend to the use of Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) as transport network between remote nodes and headend. The results show that for long CIN distances above 100 miles, the R-MACPHY architecture achieves significantly shorter mean up- stream packet delays than the R-PHY architecture, especially for bursty traffic. The extensive comparative R-PHY and R-MACPHY comparative evaluation can serve as a basis for the planning of modular broadcast cable based access networks.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

DOWNSTREAM RESOURCE ALLOCATION IN DOCSIS 3.0 CHANNEL BONDED NETWORKS

Modern broadband internet access cable systems follow the Data Over Cable System Interface Specification (DOCSIS) for data transfer between the individual cable modem (CM) and the Internet. The newest version of DOCSIS, version 3.0, provides an abstraction referred to as bonding groups to help manage bandwidth and to increase bandwidth to each user beyond that available within a single 6MHz. television channel. Channel bonding allows more than one channel to be used by a CM to provide a virtual channel of much greater bandwidth. This combining of channels into bonding groups, especially when channels overlap between more than one bonding group, complicates the resource allocation problem within these networks. The goal of resource allocation in this research is twofold, to provide for fairness among users while at the same time making maximum possible utilization of the available system bandwidth. The problem of resource allocation in computer networks has been widely studied by the academic community. Past work has studied resource allocation in many network types, however application in a DOCSIS channel bonded network has not been explored. This research begins by first developing a definition of fairness in a channel bonded system. After providing a theoretical definition of fairness we implement simulations of different scheduling disciplines and evaluate their performance against this theoretical ideal. The complexity caused by overlapped channels requires even the simplest scheduling algorithms to be modified to work correctly. We then develop an algorithm to maximize the use of the available system bandwidth. The approach involves using competitive analysis techniques and an online algorithm to dynamically reassign flows among the available channels. Bandwidth usage and demand requests are monitored for bandwidth that is underutilized, and demand that is unsatisfied, and real time changes are made to the flow-to-channel mappings to improve the utilization of the total available bandwidth. The contribution of this research is to provide a working definition of fairness in a channel bonded environment, the implementation of several scheduling disciplines and evaluation of their adherence to that definition, and development of an algorithm to improve overall bandwidth utilization of the system

Software Defined Applications in Cellular and Optical Networks

abstract: Small wireless cells have the potential to overcome bottlenecks in wireless access through the sharing of spectrum resources. A novel access backhaul network architecture based on a Smart Gateway (Sm-GW) between the small cell base stations, e.g., LTE eNBs, and the conventional backhaul gateways, e.g., LTE Servicing/Packet Gateways (S/P-GWs) has been introduced to address the bottleneck. The Sm-GW flexibly schedules uplink transmissions for the eNBs. Based on software defined networking (SDN) a management mechanism that allows multiple operator to flexibly inter-operate via multiple Sm-GWs with a multitude of small cells has been proposed. This dissertation also comprehensively survey the studies that examine the SDN paradigm in optical networks. Along with the PHY functional split improvements, the performance of Distributed Converged Cable Access Platform (DCCAP) in the cable architectures especially for the Remote-PHY and Remote-MACPHY nodes has been evaluated. In the PHY functional split, in addition to the re-use of infrastructure with a common FFT module for multiple technologies, a novel cross functional split interaction to cache the repetitive QAM symbols across time at the remote node to reduce the transmission rate requirement of the fronthaul link has been proposed.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

Análise técnico-económica de redes de acesso : ferramentas de decisão

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica e TelecomunicaçõesO recente crescimento de consumo de internet e televisão por cabo desencadeou a necessidade de novas redes de acesso. O mundo das telecomunicações tornou-se num negócio competitivo entre as operadoras. As estratégias de competitividade são agora com baseadas em qualidade do serviço e na acessibilidade dos preços a todas as categorias da população. Para garantir estes requisitos é necessário inovar em equipamentos e meios de distribuição. A implantação de novas redes de acesso tornou-se crucial na sociedade, mas a recente crise económica mundial forçou um dimensionamento cuidado para garantir o máximo lucro possível no negócio. Portanto esta dissertação apresenta uma análise económica e financeira da implementação de uma rede HFC. Mostra a estrutura da rede e as suas características tecnológicas, além disso explica como lidar com problemas no dimensionamento da rede: a incerteza espacial associada ao processo de adesão dos utilizadores e como lidar com consumo em excesso de largura de banda, também causado pelos utilizadores. Por fim realiza o estudo da instalação da rede HFC em três tipos diferentes de cenários e expondo os resultados económicos obtidos, permitindo a conclusão sobre a viabilidade destes projetos.The recent growth in Data Traffic and Cable Tv consumption triggered the need for new access networks and the world of Telecommunications has become a very competitive business among service providers. The strategies of competitiveness are now based on quality of services and affordable prices to all classes of the population. To guarantee these requirements, an equipment and distribution facilities innovation was necessary. The deployment of Next Generation Access Networks (NGA) has become crucial in society, but the recent world economic crisis has forced a careful dimensioning to produce the most profit possible with small investments. This dissertation presents a techno-economic analysis of a HFC network implementation. The network structure and technologic characteristics are presented, along with explanation of how to deal with problems in the network dimensioning: as spatial uncertainty associated with the adhesion process of the users and the surplus consumption of bandwidth by them. Finally, the study of the network implementation in three different sorts of areas is shown and the economic results obtained are exposed, providing the viability of these projects

Leveraging Kubernetes in Edge-Native Cable Access Convergence

Public clouds provide infrastructure services and deployment frameworks for modern cloud-native applications. As the cloud-native paradigm has matured, containerization, orchestration and Kubernetes have become its fundamental building blocks. For the next step of cloud-native, an interest to extend it to the edge computing is emerging. Primary reasons for this are low-latency use cases and the desire to have uniformity in cloud-edge continuum. Cable access networks as specialized type of edge networks are not exception here. As the cable industry transitions to distributed architectures and plans the next steps to virtualize its on-premise network functions, there are opportunities to achieve synergy advantages from convergence of access technologies and services. Distributed cable networks deploy resource-constrained devices like RPDs and RMDs deep in the edge networks. These devices can be redesigned to support more than one access technology and to provide computing services for other edge tenants with MEC-like architectures. Both of these cases benefit from virtualization. It is here where cable access convergence and cloud-native transition to edge-native intersect. However, adapting cloud-native in the edge presents a challenge, since cloud-native container runtimes and native Kubernetes are not optimal solutions in diverse edge environments. Therefore, this thesis takes as its goal to describe current landscape of lightweight cloud-native runtimes and tools targeting the edge. While edge-native as a concept is taking its first steps, tools like KubeEdge, K3s and Virtual Kubelet can be seen as the most mature reference projects for edge-compatible solution types. Furthermore, as the container runtimes are not yet fully edge-ready, WebAssembly seems like a promising alternative runtime for lightweight, portable and secure Kubernetes compatible workloads

New contention resolution schemes for WiMAX

Abstract—The use of Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) technology is increasing due to the use of Internet and multimedia applications with strict requirements of end–to–end delay and jitter, through wireless devices. The IEEE 802.16 standard, which defines the physical (PHY) and the medium access control (MAC) layers, is one of the BWA standards. Its MAC layer is centralized basis, where the Base Station (BS) is responsible for assigning the needed bandwidth for each Subscriber Station (SS), which requests bandwidth competing between all of them. The standard defines a contention resolution process to resolve the potential occurrence of collisions during the requesting process. In this paper, we propose to modify the contention resolution process to improve the network performance, including end–to–end delay and throughput

DOCSIS 3.1 cable modem and upstream channel simulation in MATLAB

The cable television (CATV) industry has grown significantly since its inception in the late 1940’s. Originally, a CATV network was comprised of several homes that were connected to community antennae via a network of coaxial cables. The only signal processing done was by an analogue amplifier, and transmission only occurred in one direction (i.e. from the antennae/head-end to the subscribers). However, as CATV grew in popularity, demand for services such as pay-per-view television increased, which lead to supporting transmission in the upstream direction (i.e. from subscriber to the head-end). This greatly increased the signal processing to include frequency diplexers. CATV service providers began to expand the bandwidth of their networks in the late 90’s by switching from analogue to digital technology. In an effort to regulate the manufacturing of new digital equipment and ensure interoperability of products from different manufacturers, several cable service providers formed a non-for-profit consortium to develop a data-over-cable service interface specification (DOCSIS). The consortium, which is named CableLabs, released the first DOCSIS standard in 1997. The DOCSIS standard has been upgraded over the years to keep up with increased consumer demand for large bandwidths and faster transmission speeds, particularly in the upstream direction. The latest version of the DOCSIS standard, DOCSIS 3.1, utilizes orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) technology to provide upstream transmission speeds of up to 1 Gbps. As cable service providers begin the process of upgrading their upstream receivers to comply with the new DOCSIS 3.1 standard, they require a means of testing the various functions that an upstream receiver may employ. It is convenient for service providers to employ cable modem (CM) plus channel emulator to perform these tests in-house during the product development stage. Constructing the emulator in digital technology is an attractive option for testing. This thesis approaches digital emulation by developing a digital model of the CMs and upstream channel in a DOCSIS 3.1 network. The first step in building the emulator is to simulate its operations in MATLAB, specifically upstream transmission over the network. The MATLAB model is capable of simulating transmission from multiple CMs, each of which transmits using a specific “transmission mode.” The three transmission modes described in the DOCSIS 3.1 standard are included in the model. These modes are “traffic mode,” which is used during regular data transmission; “fine ranging mode,” which is used to perform fine timing and power offset corrections; and “probing” mode, which is presumably used for estimating the frequency response of the channel, but also is used to further correct the timing and power offsets. The MATLAB model is also capable of simulating the channel impairments a signal may encounter when traversing the upstream channel. Impairments that are specific to individual CMs include integer and fractional timing offsets, micro-reflections, carrier phase offset (CPO), fractional carrier frequency offset (CFO), and network gain/attenuation. Impairments common to all CMs include carrier hum modulation, AM/FM ingress noise, and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). It is the hope that the MATLAB scripts that make up the simulation be translated to Verilog HDL to implement the emulator on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) in the near future. In the event that an FPGA implementation is pursued, research was conducted into designing efficient fractional delay filters (FDFs), which are essential in the simulation of micro-reflections. After performing an FPGA implementation cost analysis between various FDF designs, it was determined that a Kaiser-windowed sinc function FDF with roll-off parameter β = 3.88 was the most cost-efficient choice, requiring at total of 24 multipliers when implemented using an optimized structure

Downstream Bandwidth Management for Emerging DOCSIS-based Networks

In this dissertation, we consider the downstream bandwidth management in the context of emerging DOCSIS-based cable networks. The latest DOCSIS 3.1 standard for cable access networks represents a significant change to cable networks. For downstream, the current 6 MHz channel size is replaced by a much larger 192 MHz channel which potentially can provide data rates up to 10 Gbps. Further, the current standard requires equipment to support a relatively new form of active queue management (AQM) referred to as delay-based AQM. Given that more than 50 million households (and climbing) use cable for Internet access, a clear understanding of the impacts of bandwidth management strategies used in these emerging networks is crucial. Further, given the scope of the change provided by emerging cable systems, now is the time to develop and introduce innovative new methods for managing bandwidth. With this motivation, we address research questions pertaining to next generation of cable access networks. The cable industry has had to deal with the problem of a small number of subscribers who utilize the majority of network resources. This problem will grow as access rates increase to gigabits per second. Fundamentally this is a problem on how to manage data flows in a fair manner and provide protection. A well known performance issue in the Internet, referred to as bufferbloat, has received significant attention recently. High throughput network flows need sufficiently large buffer to keep the pipe full and absorb occasional burstiness. Standard practice however has led to equipment offering very large unmanaged buffers that can result in sustained queue levels increasing packet latency. One reason why these problems continue to plague cable access networks is the desire for low complexity and easily explainable (to access network subscribers and to the Federal Communications Commission) bandwidth management. This research begins by evaluating modern delay-based AQM algorithms in downstream DOCSIS 3.0 environments with a focus on fairness and application performance capabilities of single queue AQMs. We are especially interested in delay-based AQM schemes that have been proposed to combat the bufferbloat problem. Our evaluation involves a variety of scenarios that include tiered services and application workloads. Based on our results, we show that in scenarios involving realistic workloads, modern delay-based AQMs can effectively mitigate bufferbloat. However they do not address the other problem related to managing the fairness. To address the combined problem of fairness and bufferbloat, we propose a novel approach to bandwidth management that provides a compromise among the conflicting requirements. We introduce a flow quantization method referred to as adaptive bandwidth binning where flows that are observed to consume similar levels of bandwidth are grouped together with the system managed through a hierarchical scheduler designed to approximate weighted fairness while addressing bufferbloat. Based on a simulation study that considers many system experimental parameters including workloads and network configurations, we provide evidence of the efficacy of the idea. Our results suggest that the scheme is able to provide long term fairness and low delay with a performance close to that of a reference approach based on fair queueing. A further contribution is our idea for replacing `tiered\u27 levels of service based on service rates with tiering based on weights. The application of our bandwidth binning scheme offers a timely and innovative alternative to broadband service that leverages the potential offered by emerging DOCSIS-based cable systems

Measuring the Phase Variation of a DOCSIS 3.1 Full Duplex Channel

Including a Full Duplex option into DOCSIS introduces several problems. One of the more troublesome issues is the presence of a strong self interference signal that leaks from the transmit side to the receive side of a cable node. This self interference is caused by echoes in the channel that translate the forward travelling transmit signals into a reverse travelling signal, as well as, by leakage from the hybrid coupler used to couple the upstream and downstream signals. To suppress this self interference an echo canceller is implemented to remove the unwanted interference from the received signal. Unfortunately with the high rates of data transmission used in modern day CATV networks the echo canceller needs tremendous precision. A major concern in the implementation of Full Duplex into DOCSIS is if the channels used are even very slightly time varying. The echos in such channels change with time and can be difficult for the echo canceller to track. Changes in the response of the channel cause the echo profile of the network to shift and the echo canceler to re-adapt to the new channel response. The issue with this changing response is that it is possible for the channel to change faster than the echo canceller can adapt, resulting in the interference becoming unacceptably high. Since the channel is a physical network of coaxial cables often exposed to the environment, its propagation properties can be affected by wind swaying pole mounted cables, or by rapid heating from the sun, or sudden shifts in the load of the network. With information on how the physical properties of the cable changes, the engineers designing the echo canceller can know how fast the canceller must adapt to changes and also have a better measure of how reliable its echo cancellation will be. In this thesis the stability of the echo profile of the channel is measured. It is shown that the property of the channel with the greatest potential to rapidly change and cause noise after echo cancellation is the phase response of the channel. Due to this, the approach of this thesis is to measure the fluctuations in the phase of the channel response of a CATV network constructed in the lab. To measure the fluctuations in the phase response of the channel, a PLL (Phase Locked Loop) based circuit is designed and built on an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) and connected to a model of a simple CATV network. The PLL circuit used to measure the phase fluctuations of the channel is designed to be able to measure changes occurring faster than 0.1 Hz and with a power higher than $10^{-7} \: V^2$. The circuit is able to capture data from the channel over a period of 90 seconds. Using this phase variation measurement circuit a series of experiments were performed on a model CATV DOCSIS network. It was found that many physical disturbances to the network had the effect of rapidly shifting the phase response of the network. Heating the cables in the network was found to shift the phase response upwards of $20000\:\mu$radians. Flexing the cables in the network was found to have a peak phase variation of $8000\: \mu$radians with similar effects found from walking over cables. Overall, it was clear that physical effects on the network had the propensity to rapidly shift the network response. Any echo canceller that is designed in the future will have to consider these effects when reporting the cancellation that it is able to achieve