Patent ID: 7408892

Claim:
An upstream adaptive modulation method for broadband communications systems, comprising: defining burst parameters associated with a range of data interval usage codes (IUCs), wherein each of the data IUCs potentially has different modulation order and forward error correction (FEC) parameters; monitoring signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and codeword error rates for satellite modems in a network; dynamically assigning the data IUCs to the satellite modems within an upstream channel according to at least one of the SNR and the codeword error rate to enable each of the satellite modems in the upstream channel to achieve maximum bandwidth efficiency during upstream data transmissions; receiving bandwidth requests from the satellite modems; granting the bandwidth requests, wherein the grant includes the assigned data IUC; and processing data from received bursts using parameters from the assigned data IUCs for each of the satellite modems sending data in the upstream channel.