Provisioning of cable modems with transmission frequency information

摘要

A system for provisioning cable modems (205) with frequency information for communication with a Cable Modem Termination System (CMTS) (120) in a cable television plant. In a first embodiment, a virtual channel map of programming services (e.g., television program) is examined (150, 160) to determine which carrier frequencies are unused. These unused frequencies are used to form a table of available CMTS frequencies that is transmitted to the cable modems (205). The modems then have to only search a subset of all frequencies to locate one having a CMTS identifying signal. Alternatively, the modem (205) can be directly informed of the CMTS frequency, so no searching is required. In a further embodiment, multiple CMTSs are used at the headend (300), and a traffic monitoring function (310) dynamically adjusts the frequency used by the modems for upstream transmissions to balance the load on the CMTSs.