Performance investigation into an IEEE 802.14 MAC protocol for HFC networks

The paper provides insight into the performance of a candidate IEEE 802.14 MAC protocol for Hybrid Fibre/Coax (HFC) networks, by simulation. The simulations make use of two types of input traffic: measured traffic traces, and randomly generated memoryless traffic. It is confirmed that the protocol does not reach congestion collapse under any traffic load, and this is found to hold regardless of traffic type. The paper demonstrates that memoryless traffic streams cannot be used for dimensioning guidelines as they underestimate delay as compared to real traffic traces. The paper also compares between the performance of the protocol loaded by traffic traces with that of a benchmark based on an ideal multiplexer under the same traffic conditions. It is demonstrated that both the throughput and delay performance of the protocol converge to that of an ideal multiplexer, with an increasing number of active stations.