Patent ID: 8897651

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a wavelength-division multiplexer (WDM); an optical network unit (ONU) coupled to the WDM; a passive optical network (PON) data over cable service interface specification (DOCSIS) upstream proxy (PDUP) coupled to the ONU and configured to: couple to a coaxial cable; encapsulate an upstream burst signal into a payload field of an Ethernet frame using a time-division multiplexing (TDM) PON protocol to provide an upstream (US) scheduling mechanism in a point to multipoint (P2MP) topology of a hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network, wherein the upstream scheduling mechanism does not use DOCSIS timing information, and wherein the Ethernet frame comprises a frame check sequence (FCS) field; and encapsulate the Ethernet frame into an Ethernet PON (EPON) frame comprising an EPON header field; and a downstream (DS) optical/electrical (0/E) converter coupled to the WDM and configured to couple to the coaxial cable.