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Pre-emption mechanism for packet transport

  • US 8,718,067 B2
  • Filed: 11/24/2004
  • Issued: 05/06/2014
  • Est. Priority Date: 11/24/2004
  • Status: Expired due to Fees
First Claim
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1. A method of encapsulating data from prioritized data packets in frames for transport in a DSL communication system, the method comprising:

  • forming frames consisting of an integer number M sync bytes indicative of a frame boundary and a data field consisting of an integer number N byte fields, M and N being positive integers, wherein the individual frames are a fixed number N+M bytes long and further configured for transmission as individual frames in the DSL communication system;

    encapsulating data from data packets in data fields of one or more frames for transportation in the DSL communication system, wherein a length of at least one of the data packets to be encapsulated is larger than the length of a data field of each frame;

    selectively suspending encapsulation of data from a data packet of a first priority to encapsulate data from a pre-empting data packet of a second priority; and

    resuming encapsulation of at least a portion of remaining data from a suspended data packet of the first priority in a frame in which a pre-empting data packet of the second priority is completed;

    wherein both the pre-empting and pre-empted data packets can be short packets having a length less than N-1 bytes;

    wherein the pre-empting packet is a short packet that starts and completes in a single frame, and wherein resuming encapsulation of at least a portion of the remaining data comprises encapsulating at least a portion of the remaining data from the suspended data packet in the frame in which the pre-empting data packet starts and completes;

    wherein resuming encapsulation of at least a portion of remaining data from a suspended data packet comprises providing a control byte in the data field after a final data byte of the pre-empting data packet, the control byte being indicative of an end of the data bytes of the suspended data packet in the data field of the same frame.

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