Patent ID: 7929471

Claim:
A method for efficiently transmitting a frame in a communication system, the method comprising: providing M sync bytes indicative of a frame boundary, wherein M is a positive integer; providing a frame data field consisting of an integer number N byte fields, the M sync bytes and the N-byte frame data field forming a frame; providing an entire short data packet in the frame data field, the short data packet having a length less than N−1 data bytes; providing at least one data byte of a second data packet in the frame data field; and providing first and second control bytes in the frame data field, the first control byte being indicative of an end of the data bytes of the short data packet in the frame data field and being prior to the start of the data bytes of the short data packet in the frame data field, and the second control byte being indicative of an end of the data bytes of the second data packet in a subsequent frame and being prior to the start of the data bytes of the second data packet in the frame data field; transmitting the frame from a transmitter to a receiver over a communication channel of the communication system.