US Patent 7894483 Multi-carrier communication via sub-carrier groups

One embodiment of the present invention relates to a method for communicating over a multi-carrier communication channel. In the method, sub-carrier frequencies that are reserved for communication between a pair of network nodes are associated with different sub-carrier groups, where the sub-carriers of each sub-carrier group are assigned to a bitloading or gain configuration that is independent of the bitloading or gain configurations for the other respective sub-carrier groups. A group message, which is indicative of the bitloading or gain configurations for the respective sub-carrier groups, is transmitted from the receiving node to the transmitting node.