RoIP Compression Method in Burst Noise Upstream Environment for CATV Network

Abstract

A hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network uses both optical fibers and coaxial cables for cable TV networks. Coaxial cables are mainly used for access networks. Recently, fiber to the home (FTTH) is being widely deployed. For cable TV companies to utilize readily deployed FTTH, legacy coax network-based customer premise equipment (CPE) such as cable modems and set top boxes may have to be replaced with fiber network based CPE. In order to reduce the expenditure incurred in this process, radio over Internet Protocol (RoIP) technology has been proposed. In the RoIP system, RF signal for coax generated by legacy CPE toward the headend is first sampled, and digitized, and then encapsulated in IP packets, which are then sent to the headend using FTTH access technologies such as passive optical network (PON). In the process of digitizing RF signal, a huge amount of data much more than the base band data is generated. So, a data compression method is required to lower the upstream bit rate maintaining the signal quality. Most compression methods are significantly degraded due to the interference caused by burst noise in the upstream link. Therefore, this paper proposes a new compression method which combines linear predictive coding (LPC), block scaling and non-linear quantization for CATV upstream links. The proposed method is demonstrated to greatly reduce the impact of burst noise while maintaining the compression performance.