Patent ID: 6956834
Filing Date: 2005-10-18
Classification: H04L,H04Q,H04W

Abstract:
1. A method for allocating bandwidth in a broadband wireless communication system, wherein the wireless communication system includes a plurality of customer premise equipment (CPE) in communication with associated and corresponding base stations, and wherein the base stations maintain uplink and downlink sub-frame maps representative of the bandwidth allocations in the uplink and downlink communication paths, the method comprising the steps of: (a) determining whether there is sufficient available bandwidth to individually poll a selected CPE; (b) if sufficient bandwidth is determined to be available in step (a), determining whether there are either unpolled inactive CPEs present or unpolled active CPEs requesting to be polled, else proceeding to step (e); (c) polling a selected CPE by allocating bandwidth to the CPE in the uplink sub-frame map; (d) continuing to individually poll other selected CPEs by repeating steps (a)-(c) until it is determined in step (a) that there is insufficient available bandwidth to individually poll the CPEs; (e) initiating a multicast and broadcast polling process; (f) determining whether any individual CPE polls were initiated in step (c); (g) if no individual CPE polls were initiated in step (c), terminating the method, else awaiting individual bandwidth requests from the CPEs polled in step (c); (h) receiving a bandwidth request from a selected CPE; and (i) initiating a bandwidth allocation process and allocating bandwidth in the uplink sub-frame map for the selected CPE that transmitted the bandwidth request received in step (h).