Patent attributes
A shared bandwidth network system to communicate network traffic between terminals and an external network is disclosed. The system includes: a point of presence (POP) for the external network; Radio Frequency Gateways (RFGWs) wherein each RFGW of the RFGWs provides one or more Radio Frequency (RF) paths, and each of the RF paths links a respective RFGW of the RFGWs with one or more terminals of the terminals; an RF path state manager to manage a RF path state for each of the RF paths; a Satellite Network Core (SNC); a Software Defined Network (SDN) controller to maintain a topology based on the RF path states, wherein the topology includes the POP, the RFGWs and the SNC; and a network layer to route network traffic between the POP, the RFGWs and the SNC based on the topology. The SNC includes a bandwidth manager to allocate bandwidth, to provide flow control to the terminals, and to provide a key state including a bandwidth allocation for each of the terminals, a key state manager to maintain the key states, and a link layer control (LLC) to transport network traffic over each of the RF paths.