c.LINK® Home Networking
Entropic's home networking products are based on an innovative platform technology that allows very high-speed and reliable communications between coaxial home outlets without the need to modify the home coax system and without interfering with existing cable TV services.
Breaking Communications Barriers
Our c.LINK technology has been designed to address the very difficult communications environment of the coax home network architecture. The coax home system is designed for a "vertical" communications to and from the cable system head-end to the devices connected to coax outlets in the home, such as TV sets and STBs, and has in the past primarily been used for the delivery of cable TV, data (cable modem) and more recently, VoIP services. The in-home coax architecture has been specifically designed to prevent inter-outlet communications through the use of splitters with high port-to-port isolation. This leads to a highly dispersive PHY channel over which it is difficult for typical digital communication systems to operate. The historical inability to address these issues associated with the in-home coax architecture has contributed to the creation of "islands" of digital entertainment within the home.
Entropic's c.LINK home networking technology is a full-mesh, peer-to-peer network. It overcomes the inherent limitations of home coax cabling and enables high-speed "horizontal" communications between the outlets in cable home, providing room-to-room connectivity. This is accomplished through a combination of an adaptive PHY that optimizes the signal modulation in order to maximize the channel capacity of the in-home coax network and a unique MAC protocol that maintains very low latency independent of network load by allocating channel resources without contention or retransmission.
Our home networking solution is implemented using an efficient and flexible architecture through an optimized combination of hardware, firmware, software and cost effective RFIC and SoC implementations. The system also simplifies installation and maintenance requirements through the use of an ad-hoc network controller functionality, which makes the network self-healing and provides redundancy.
Backbone for Connected Home Entertainment
Entropic's c.LINK home networking technology has been selected as the basis for the MoCA standard for home networking over coax after a selection process that involved an extensive and successful field trial conducted by MoCA. The field trial demonstrated that our home networking technology repeatedly achieved a very reliable net throughput in excess of 110 Mbps at acceptable packet error rate levels to support in-home video distribution at quality levels suitable for server provider-based pay-TV deployments. This net throughput allows for the simultaneous delivery of four full-rate HDTV channels and other services, such as voice and data.
c.LINK makes connected home entertainment possible by creating a network which taps into the 4 gigabits per second (Gbps) of usable bandwidth above the video band between 860-2000 MHz. c.LINK Home Networking enables entertainment devices such as TVs, DVRs, DVDs, CD/MP3s and PCs to seamlessly interconnect throughout the whole house, as shown in the following diagram.
Primary applications of c.LINK Home Networking include:
- Multi-room HDTV DVR
- All Home Media Center
- Multi-room gaming
- Broadband Backbone
- Home media server with thin clients
- FTTP with in-home coax distribution