Patent ID: 8279888

Claim:
An apparatus for upstream transmission of variable bit rate Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) traffic in a Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) network, said apparatus comprising: a VoIP signal processing unit for digitizing a voice signal generated by a speaker to create a voice packet, detecting a mute section to suppress packet generation, and generating a Service identification (SID) packet in the mute section; a storage unit for temporarily storing and queuing the voice packet and the SID packet created by the VoIP signal processing unit and providing information on a size of each of the stored packets; a VoIP activity determining unit for determining a voice activity based on the information on the size of each of the stored packets provided by the storage unit; and a packet processing unit for including the voice activity transferred from the VoIP activity determining unit in the packets from the storage unit, and transmitting the packets with the included voice activity to a network device to thereby allow the network device to allocate a resource with a suitable size depending on the voice activity; wherein the voice activity is one selected from the group consisting of a first value requesting the network device to execute polling without allocating resources, a second value requesting resource allocation of an SID packet length, a third value requesting resource allocation of a voice packet length.