Granted Patent B1

US 7,542,411 · App. 11/229,297 · Granted Jun 2, 2009

Abstract

Claims (16)

1. A method of communicating using orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) signaling between a first node and a second node in a communication network comprising the steps of:

sending an echo profile probe from the first node;

receiving the echo profile probe at the second node;

calculating a cyclic prefix length from the received probe message contents;

transmitting the cyclic prefix length from the second node to the first node; and

sending messages from the first node to the second node using the cyclic prefix length;

wherein the communication network comprises nodes interconnected with coaxial cable and passive signal splitters; and

wherein the cyclic prefix length is calculated by determining the channel delay spread wherein echo peaks are identified by cross-correlation between the received echo profile probe and the sent echo profile probe, the channel delay spread is calculated as the delay between echo peaks, then a predetermined design margin value is added to the channel delay spread to produce the cyclic prefix length.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the echo profile probe is sent according to a map broadcast by a network controller.

3. A method of communicating using orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) signaling between a first node and a second node in a communication network comprising the steps of:

sending an echo profile probe from the first node;

receiving the echo profile probe at the second node;

calculating a cyclic prefix length from the received probe message contents;

transmitting the cyclic prefix length from the second node to the first node; and

sending messages from the first node to the second node using the cyclic prefix length;

wherein the echo profile probe comprises 1024 pseudo-random BPSK-modulated bits generated using an m-sequence of degree 10 given by the generator polynomial 2201 8 with an initial seed of 3FF 16 .

Assignments (9)