| 摘要 |
A bi-directional communications network (e.g. for video telephony or work-at-home data application) is disclosed, and in particular a TDM/TDMA protocol for the shared coax medium downstream/upstream resource. The protocol includes a high data rate upstream channel which transmits at the same data rate as the downstream channel. This protocol enables very high bandwidth efficiency in the upstream channel. This protocol provides a very efficient technique for resource sharing in the Access Network of HFC systems. A TDMA protocol operable in a communications network, is also disclosed, wherein each outstation has an ATM cell slot request mechanism and an ATM cell slot request slot in every frame and the basestation allocates cell slots to outstations on a per-frame basis. This provides dedicated-per-user, short cell-request time slots in the TDMA frame to allow cell allocation before the start of the next downstream cell allocation burst. |
