The preferred embodiment of the present invention provides a method and
apparatus for dealing with scheduling latency in high-speed modems (100)
implemented on host processors (101). With the present invention, high
scheduling latency of the host operating system (135) is tolerated without
incurring large end-to-end transmission delay. In addition, time alignment
between downstream and upstream signals (175, 180) is achieved even though
the scheduling delay may be large and varying.