Patent ID: 7203206

Claim:
A method for transmitting a stream of data over a channel made up of a plurality of subchannels having respective subchannel rates, the method comprising: partitioning the data among the subchannels, such that responsive to the respective subchannel rates, successive words of the data, including at least first, second and third words in succession, are mapped to the subchannels in alternation, whereby the first word is mapped to a first subchannel, the second word is mapped to a second subchannel, and the third word is mapped to one of the first subchannel and a third subchannel; transmitting the words of the data over the subchannels to which they are mapped; and receiving and processing the words from the subchannels to recover the stream of data, wherein partitioning the data comprises deciding, for each word among the successive words, to which of the subchannels the word should be mapped, and wherein deciding to which of the subchannels the word should be mapped comprises assigning respective numbers of the words to the subchannels so that at any point in time while transmitting the words of the data over the subchannels, a ratio of the numbers of the words that have been assigned to each of a given pair of the subchannels is approximately equal to the ratio of the respective subchannel rates.