Patent ID: 7133441

Claim:
An apparatus for transporting a high speed data stream over a channel consisting of a plurality of relatively low bandwidth twisted copper pair lines, comprising; an encoder for applying an error correction encoding scheme to said high speed data stream; a plurality of modem elements coupled to said plurality of twisted copper pair lines, each modem element associated with one of said copper pair lines and configured to operate at a data rate, delay, signal to noise ratio, and bit error rate independent of other modem elements; a dispatcher operative to divide said encoded high speed data stream into a plurality of low rate data streams to be transmitted by said plurality of modem elements, said dispatcher adapted to forward a low rate data stream to each modem element in accordance with the data rate of each modem; a collector operative to combine a plurality of data streams received by said plurality of modem elements into a received high speed data stream; a decoder adapted to receive said received high speed data stream output from said collector and to apply an error correction decoding scheme so as to generate an original high speed data stream; means for selecting the parameters for codewords generated by said encoder so as to provide desired resiliency to line failures, minimum bit error rate (BER) and maximum bandwidth, said parameters consisting of K and R, wherein K-R represents the number of bytes in a payload portion of said codeword and R represents the number of bytes in a redundancy portion of said codeword, wherein said codewords are distributed to said plurality of modem elements for transmission over said plurality of low bandwidth twisted copper pair lines, each modem element having a data rate, delay, signal to noise ratio, and BER independent of other modem elements, said means for selecting comprising: means for computing the maximum number of bytes from a codeword to be sent over each modem element in accordance with its corresponding data rate, for all valid combination of codeword size K and redundancy length R; means for summing the number of bytes from a single codeword to be transmitted, for all combinations of line failures; means for marking this combination only if said sum is less than R/2; means for computing an overhead for all marked combinations; and means for selecting from among all combinations of K and R wherein an associated overhead was computed, the combination yielding a minimum overhead.