Patent ID: 8811165

Claim:
A method, comprising: responsive to a first reservation request in a first minislot of a frame of a plurality of frames comprising a plurality of minislots that is reserved for an ongoing voice call, via a downlink channel, broadcasting, by a central station, information regarding an assignment of a first slot of a plurality of slots of the plurality of frames to transmit a speech talkspurt of voice traffic, the plurality of slots transmitted via an uplink channel, the first reservation request for causing a contention-free reservation of the first slot; receiving, by the central station, a message indicative of an end of the speech talkspurt in the voice traffic, wherein the message is contained in the first slot of the plurality of slots that is included in a penultimate frame of the plurality of frames containing the speech talkspurt; responsive to the message indicative of the end of the speech talkspurt in the voice traffic, broadcasting, by the central station, information regarding an assignment of a second minislot of the plurality of minislots to carry the voice traffic, the second minislot for transmitting silence compression and background imitation during a speech silence in the voice traffic; and responsive to the message indicative of the end of the speech talkspurt in the voice traffic, via the downlink channel, broadcasting, by the central station to a plurality of user terminals, information regarding a reassignment of the first slot of the plurality of slots to transmit data traffic, where the data traffic that is assigned to the first slot is based on a blocked binary tree algorithm.