Patent ID: 7260069

Claim:
A system for communicating with a large number of remote satellite locations comprising: a plurality of a first set of remote terminal devices; a plurality of second remote terminal devices operating in a dedicated mode using the same overlapping channels; and a hub site which determines threshold criteria for determining when said remote terminal devices are active, and allocates said channels, wherein when said one of said plurality of second remote terminal devices has been sufficiently active during a sliding window, said one of said plurality of second remote terminal devices directly accesses said channels, wherein collisions between inbound packets from different ones of said first and second remote terminal devices are prevented by allocating one of frequency, time slot, and frequency and time slot to said ones of said first and second remote terminal devices that generate the most inbound traffic, wherein when there are more active ones of said first and second remote terminal devices than there are channels, each of said first and second remote terminal devices is allocated a mini-slot, wherein said hub site calculates load for each of said first and second remote terminal devices and retains loads in memory, and wherein said hub site correlates loads for each of said first and second remote terminal devices with the last time slot in which a burst was last received from each of said first and second remote terminal devices, and maintains said correlated loads in an allocation table.