A Novel Method to Perform Low-Complexity Multiplexing Over Cable Networks

The paper proposes an innovative system to multiplex digital information over a cable network. The key principle is to artificially create multiple reflections in a controlled way and use multi-path propagation. At the transmitter side, the information is modulated by letting termination impedances vary. At the receiver side, network scattering parameters are measured for different frequencies and used by supervised classification techniques to recover the digital streams of the transmitters. The system is optimized through the joint design of four parts: the transmitter modulation scheme, the cable network characteristics, the measured scattering parameters and the receiver algorithm. We particularly investigate the network topology, the measurement frequencies, and the distance metrics. A low-complexity receiver algorithm is presented.