Evaluation of Return Architecture for increasing HFC capacity

Abstract

With today's progress of digital compression technology, the Cable system comes to one of the best solution for the information superhighway. The Cable operators have ambitious plans to upgrade their existing network to supply their subscribers with more bandwidth. Dealing with these challenges of building and managing Cable-information-superhighway-network successfully, how to expand return capacity is the most difficult problem from the view of cost and system-reliability. Now, Several ways such as Frequency Stacking, Wavelength Division Multiplexing are recommended. We evaluate these return architectures using NPR testing technique, and recommend the Wavelength Division Multiplexing as the best return architecture for increasing HFC return capacity.