Patent ID: 7835314

Claim:
A method of establishing communication across a broadband wireless access communication network between a base station and a subscriber station, said method comprising: at said base station, (a) broadcasting over a downstream channel physical layer downstream frames to the subscriber station and (b) receiving from the subscriber station a respective burst of physical layer upstream frames on an upstream channel; at the subscriber station, (c) extracting the downstream frames addressed to the subscriber station in said downstream channel and (d) transmitting to said base station the respective burst of upstream frames in assigned time-slots allocated to said subscriber station in the upstream channel; and (e) transmitting the upstream channel and the downstream channel between said base station and said subscriber station using a specified duplexing technique, wherein the downstream channel uses a time division multiplexing (TDM) transmission protocol, and the upstream channel uses a time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol, and wherein the downstream frames have a fixed length including a configurable-length payload field containing at least one MAC packet or fragment thereof and a preamble field including a header indicating whether the data in the payload following the header represents a new MAC packet or a tail end of a MAC packet continued from a previous frame, and wherein at least when said header indicates that the data in the payload following the header represents a tail end of a MAC packet, said preamble further includes a pointer indicating the position of the start of a new MAC packet within the frame.