Patent ID: 7339945

Claim:
A method for partitioning information on a cable network, including one or more appliances and data associated with each transmitting appliance, wherein the associated data comprises a bit rate and a frame length, said method comprising: creating a source stream from at least one data frame generated by each transmitting appliance, the source stream being a continuous and consecutive representation of the at least one data frame, wherein the source stream contains at least one source frame that corresponds to at least one data frame and the at least one source frame contains at least one segment, and wherein each segment is associated with one of the transmitting appliances and is assigned a code indicating a predetermined level of importance; creating a partition stream by grouping each segment with one of the assigned codes from each source frame, each partition stream containing at least one block, wherein each block represents an amount of time in relation to the bit rate and frame length of the associated data; and creating a code stream, corresponding to each block with the same assigned code, and containing at least one coded frame, wherein each coded frame represents an amount of time to process one block from every source stream.