Modeling the channel capacity for different generations of in-home data transmission systems

Cable based TV and data systems are quite common in modern homes. The ability to handle naturally triple play or even n-play services, starting with TV, data transmission and telephony, is the major advantage of Cable TV system over similar technologies. The paper is proposing to present an original vision of the evolution for cable based technologies, identifying three basic generations, and to propose a methodology to evaluate the transmission capacity for each generation. The mathematical aspects of channel capacity estimation are briefly presented and discussed. The software components, acquired, modified or developed, are implemented and tested in Matlab, but most components are functional in open source environments like Octave. The paper describes the most important blocks and present results of the simulation.