Koninklijke Philips Corporation N.V.

Marouane Berrada

Am&eacute;rico Brajal

The invention relates to a communication system comprising a plurality of interactive terminals which communicate with a master station via a transmission medium. The invention is particularly applied to interactive satellite broadcast systems. The invention relates to a request mechanism permitting the interactive terminals to have reservations assigned to them on the transmission medium for transmitting information to the master station. When a terminal receives assignments that have not yet expired, it temporarily stores them in an assignment memory. The invention comprises taking the number of assignments contained in this memory into account when a new request is transmitted. It thus permits to avoid that requests for the assignments that have already been granted are formulated again.

Request mechanism for a communication system between interactive terminals and master station

Disclosed is a communication system comprising a main station, a transmission medium, and terminals. The terminals transmit requests to the main station have reservations granted to them on the transmission medium. Each request indicates a number of reservations. Upon receiving a request, the main station adds the number of reservations indicated to an allocation counter associated with the requesting terminal. The invention enables the requesting method to be less vulnerable to data losses. It consists in a resetting of the request counter and allocation counter, for example when an anomaly is detected in the transmission of the data.

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Creteil, France

Marouane Berrada