Patents by Inventor William T. Hanks

William T. Hanks has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 9647786
    Abstract: With the introduction of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology in to communication channels in a cable network, cable modems that receive data downstream over subcarriers of the OFDM channel are grouped in to modulation tiers based on at least one metric. A profile is generated for each OFDM channel based on the measurements across cable modems and subcarriers related to the OFDM channel, including the metric values used to group the cable modems in to the modulation tiers. Included in an OFDM profile may be a scheme for allocating marginal cable modems in to the plurality of modulation tiers. The methods and systems for generating modulation and coding scheme profiles enable more efficient modulation by network elements.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: December 27, 2013
    Date of Patent: May 9, 2017
    Assignee: ARRIS Enterprises, Inc.
    Inventors: William T. Hanks, Jeffrey J. Howe, Ayham Al-Banna
  • Patent number: 9203638
    Abstract: A cable television plant may include fiber nodes, cable modems, a management information base (MIB), and a cable modem termination system (CMTS). The CMTS may include logic to apply information from the MIB to determine the suitability of resources assigned to the fiber nodes from particular MAC domains for providing data communications.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: April 2, 2009
    Date of Patent: December 1, 2015
    Assignee: ARRIS Enterprises, Inc.
    Inventor: William T Hanks
  • Publication number: 20150188653
    Abstract: With the introduction of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology in to communication channels in a cable network, cable modems that receive data downstream over subcarriers of the OFDM channel are grouped in to modulation tiers based on at least one metric. A profile is generated for each OFDM channel based on the measurements across cable modems and subcarriers related to the OFDM channel, including the metric values used to group the cable modems in to the modulation tiers. Included in an OFDM profile may be a scheme for allocating marginal cable modems in to the plurality of modulation tiers. The methods and systems for generating modulation and coding scheme profiles enable more efficient modulation by network elements.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 27, 2013
    Publication date: July 2, 2015
    Applicant: ARRIS Enterprises, Inc.
    Inventors: William T. Hanks, Jeffrey J. Howe, Ayham Al-Banna
  • Publication number: 20100254283
    Abstract: A cable television plant may include fiber nodes, cable modems, a management information base (MIB), and a cable modem termination system (CMTS). The CMTS may include logic to apply information from the MIB to determine the suitability of resources assigned to the fiber nodes from particular MAC domains for providing data communications.
    Type: Application
    Filed: April 2, 2009
    Publication date: October 7, 2010
    Applicant: ARRIS
    Inventor: William T. Hanks
  • Patent number: 7480241
    Abstract: CMTS software keeps track of the number of call requests accepted during a given monitoring period, this number being referred to as Count. As each call request is received, Count is compared to the current value stored in an overload state MIB (which can change multiple times during a monitoring period based on the actual overload state as reported by fault management). If Count exceeds the MIB value, the call request is denied. After the monitoring period ends, the Count of call requests accepted is reset to zero and the count value begins incrementing at the start of the next monitoring period as calls are accepted.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: September 2, 2004
    Date of Patent: January 20, 2009
    Assignee: Arris International, Inc.
    Inventors: William T. Hanks, Tom Cloonan, Brian Barker