Patent ID: 7110370

Claim:
In a bi-directional data transmission system that facilitates communications between a plurality of remote units and a central unit using a frame based discrete multi-carrier transmission scheme that has a multiplicity of discrete sub-channels provided for facilitating upstream communications between the plurality of remote units and the central unit, a method of informing the central unit of the transmission requirements of a remote unit, the method comprising the steps of: transmitting a data transmission request signal from a selected first remote to the central unit during a particular symbol in a data frame that is associated with the selected first remote unit on at least one sub-channel that are not otherwise in use by any of the remote units; transmitting data request information from the selected first remote to the central unit simultaneously with the data-transmission request signal over a plurality of the discrete sub-channels that are not in use; and allocating at least one sub-channel to the selected first remote unit in response to the data request information for facilitating upstream communications between the first remote unit and the central unit.