Patent ID: 8189514

Claim:
A method performed by a base station in a broadband wireless communication system, wherein the broadband wireless communication system includes a plurality of customer premise equipment (CPE) in communication with the base station, the method comprising: maintaining uplink and downlink sub-frame maps representative of the bandwidth allocations in uplink and downlink communication paths; and determining whether there is sufficient bandwidth available to individually poll a CPE and if sufficient bandwidth is available to individually poll a CPE, select a CPE to be polled; individually polling the selected CPE by allocating bandwidth to the selected CPE in the uplink sub-frame map for specifically enabling the selected CPE to transmit a bandwidth request; if the selected CPE transmits the bandwidth request, initiating a bandwidth allocation process to allocate bandwidth in a subsequent uplink sub-frame map for the selected CPE; and if there is not sufficient bandwidth available to individually poll the selected CPE, initiating a contention polling process.