Patent ID: 7920594

Claim:
A cable modem, comprising: a media access control (MAC) layer; communication components coupled to the MAC layer operative for communicating digital data over a shared access communication medium; a statistics collector coupled to the MAC layer for collecting statistical information relating to traffic in the media access control (MAC) layer; a lookahead scheduler coupled to the MAC layer operative for forecasting schedule transmission opportunities on a given channel, wherein the lookahead scheduler is configured to assign a forecasting function to a user based on whether or not a cycle has been detected via an autocorrelation function and a identifier function, and wherein the autocorrelation function identifies elements in a time series which are influential on a current observation of that same series and the identifier function identifies possible cycles of the time series by identifying local maxima output by the autocorrelation function; and a predictor responsive to the statistical information collected by the statistics collector, for generating prediction signals representative of future bandwidth requirements.