Patent ID: 8908716

Claim:
A cable modem termination system (CMTS), comprising: an upstream physical layer demodulator; a downstream physical layer modulator; and a media access control (MAC) configured to receive an upstream transmission from the upstream physical layer demodulator and to provide a downstream transmission to the downstream physical layer modulator; wherein the MAC is configured to bond a plurality of upstream channels in a bonded group, to receive a bandwidth request from a cable modern, wherein the bandwidth request is based on a depth of an upstream queue of data packets and includes a request for bandwidth for MAC layer overhead associated with the data packets in the upstream queue, and to issue a multichannel grant that allocates the requested bandwidth across the bonded group for use by the cable modem in transmitting a stream of data packets to the CMTS, and wherein the downstream physical layer modulator is configured to transmit the multichannel grant to the cable modem.