The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 28, 1999
Filed:
Jun. 30, 1997
Gustavo Lau, Fremont, CA (US);
Zaheer Ahmed, San Jose, CA (US);
Hojat Khelghatti, San Jose, CA (US);
Ericsson, Inc., Menlo Park, CA (US);
Abstract
An exemplary point-to-multipoint network including an upstream headend facility and a plurality of downstream network terminals ('NTs') employs a contention-based multi-slot MAC permit protocol for upstream request transmission, wherein each NT compiles a congestion rank for each upstream slot position based on feedback information supplied by the headend. At such time as an NT wishes to attempt an upstream response to an multi-slot permit, it excludes the slot position having the highest rank for purposes of selecting an upstream response slot, and chooses among the others at random. If there are two or more slots having an equally high rank, the NT still excludes only one of the slots, based on a predetermined order of priority calculated at random from the NT's unique physical ID. If an NT is not successful with its initial response in the selected slot position, it will randomly select a waiting period of zero, one or two multi-slot permit cycles before attempting another upstream transmission. If, before attempting a re-transmission, the NT observes an intervening collision between two or more other NTs in the same upstream response slot, it will increase its waiting period by yet another two permit cycles.