Patent ID: 7440391

Claim:
A method for a remote unit of an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) multipoint-to-point communications system, the method comprising: establishing communication between a first remote unit of a plurality of remote units and a host unit, wherein each of the plurality of remote units simultaneously share an OFDM waveform having adjacent spectrally overlapping carriers by transmitting information on distinct tones of the OFDM waveform, the plurality of remote units communicatively coupled to the host unit in a multipoint-to-point configuration; requesting an allocation of bandwidth from the host unit; receiving an allocation of up to a plurality of orthogonal tones from the host unit based on a characteristic of upstream information to be transmitted by the first remote unit; and transmitting the up to a plurality of tones from the first remote unit, the up to a plurality of tones modulated with the upstream information using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing.