One of the leading contenders for the backbone architecture in certain Metropolitan Area Networks is a broadband system based upon Community Antenna Television technology (CATV). Such networks are already in wide usage in the local area environment employing CSMA/CD access techniques. In the metropolitan environment, however, it is quite likely that messages will undergo several hops before reaching their destinations. In this paper, we propose a novel intelligent headend switch-filtering technique (SWIFT) which can be used to greatly increase the performance in this type of system. A salient feature of this method is that it is compatible with existing CSMA/CD based CATV adapters. In essence, the headend administers a "scheduling window" which permits local adapters to transmit. However, under the appropriate circumstances, frequency reuse may be achieved between uplink and downlink channels. This results in an increase in system throughput performance, which is dependent upon local traffic patterns. Performance models and results for the SWIFT algorithm are presented.
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