Patent ID: 7826422

Claim:
A communication system for managing use of channels in a frequency spectrum having available channels and unavailable channels in use by incumbent services, comprising: a base station wirelessly communicating with a first plurality of consumer premise equipment sites and functioning as a leader of a frequency hopping community; and a set of base stations each wirelessly communicating with a second plurality of consumer premise equipment sites and each functioning as a member base station of the frequency hopping community, wherein the leader base station generates a hopping pattern defining a dwell time for data transmissions operation periods and start times for the operation periods on each one of a working set of channels for the leader base station and for the member base stations and defining when each of the leader base station and the member base stations switch to another one of the channels in the working set, whereby only one of the set of base stations operates on one of the channels in the working set at a time wherein the base station functioning as the leader receives an identification of the available channels from the base stations functioning as members, wherein the leader base station transmits the hopping pattern to each of the member base stations, and wherein the leader base station and the member base stations communicate with the consumer premise equipment sites according to the hopping pattern.