Abstract: A system and method for configuring and managing the connectivity of a broadband, cable modem network station to a network, including a state-driven network manager having a centralized error handling state and peripheral states for initialization, dynamic host configuration, configuration download, start simple-network-management, and an operational state. The operational state monitors for error and other messages communicated from other states and sends error messages to the centralized error-handling state and request messages to an operational support system interface management task. The error handling state receives error messages and requests error event logging from the operational support system interface management task. A change upstream-or-downstream channel task optimizes channel selection.

Abstract: A cable modem link layer bridge includes a downstream forwarding task and an upstream forwarding task. The downstream forwarding task is structured to receive a first message from a cable network and forward the first message to a customer premises equipment (CPE). The upstream forwarding task is structured to receive a second message from the CPE and forward the second message to the cable network, the upstream and downstream forwarding tasks being multitasked such that the second message is forwarded by the upstream forward task while the first message is being forwarded by the downstream forwarding task.

Abstract: A system provides parallel sequences of control signals, each control signal having a determined duration (T), constant within a sequence, and a predetermined duty cycle, specific to the control signal. A microcontroller (20) includes a central processing unit (21) and a non-volatile memory (23) arranged in blocks (Bij) of lines and columns. Each line corresponds to a word containing at least as many bits as parallel sequences. A Direct Memory Access (DMA) controller (24) and an associated counter (25) sequentially address each word of a block at a fixed frequency and supply bits of this word in parallel to produce the parallel control signals.