A Scalable Residential Area Network Architecture Supporting HD-Quality Content Distribution

The feasibility of the residential area network architecture has been proposed, combined with personal video recorders (PVRs) and the fiber channel-arbitration loop (FC-AL) connection. However, the single-loop FC-AL-based architecture has the limitation on scalability. That is, the architecture only can allow 127 devices, thereby it cannot support the densely-populated apartments or buildings with thousands of users. Therefore, we propose the novel scalable multiple-loop topology-based architectures using shared disks instead of using expensive fiber channel switches. In order to provide the good scalability, we examine all feasible ring-based topology architectures, such as the ring topology, the complete graph topology, and the edge-added topology, initially from the linear topology. Based on our analyses, we have found that the complete graph topology can provide the most scalability with less use of shared disks. Finally, our experimental results based on our proposed network platform, reveals that the time-shift can be extended to almost 70 days.