摘要 |
The present invention provides a system and method of determining available bandwidth at a physical layer (PHY) device at a server on a broadband network. A link layer controller of a master administrator adaptively polls a PHY device over a set of time intervals. During polling, the controller places a PHY device's address on a line of a bus and awaits a response from the PHY device. Based upon the response from the PHY device, the administrator can determine whether the PHY device has available bandwidth. The link layer controller uses this information to recalculate its polling scheme to better make use of the available bandwidth over the shared transmission medium to which each PHY device in the network is attached.
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