US Patent 7187669 Contention management techniques for reservation-based TDMA systems

The invention is directed to techniques for improving upstream communication in a DOCSIS-based cable network or other reservation-based TDMA system. In one example, the techniques may involve dynamically adjusting the size of a contention region in a MAP interval in which upstream time slot allocation is conveyed by a MAP message broadcasted by a cable modem transmission system (CMTS) to cable modems (CMs) sharing a common upstream DOCSIS channel. By adjusting the size of the contention region in the MAP intervals based on measured traffic parameters, the system can be dynamically responsive to different upstream traffic scenarios and thereby exploit maximal upstream data throughput continually.