Patent ID: 8374118

Claim:
A system for efficient control signaling over shared communication channels, the system comprising: a gateway configured to encode and to transmit a plurality of physical layer headers, wherein: each physical layer header includes a plurality of modcode partitions, wherein: each modcode partition is associated with a respective modcode point associated with a respective physical layer header; the plurality of modcode partitions of the respective physical layer header are distributed within a data frame associated with the physical layer header; and at least a portion of the data frame including a modcode partition associated with the respective physical layer header is interleaved using a channel interleaver; a plurality of terminals, in wireless communication with the gateway via satellite, wherein the plurality of terminals are configured to: receive a digitized stream including the data frame; deinterleave at least the portion of the data frame including the modcode partition associated with the respective physical layer header using a channel deinterleaver; and decode the physical layer header associated with the data frame to determine the modcode point associated with the data frame.