A wireless terminal or other type of terminal in a communication system is controlled
in a bandwidth-efficient manner using commands associated with a terminal protocol
supported by a switch of the system. In an illustrative embodiment, a set of command
symbols are generated by: (i) resizing a command space associated with a wired
terminal protocol to obtain a reduced command space suitable for use with a wireless
terminal; (ii) generating a representation in which a first portion of the reduced
command space is correlated with a second portion of the reduced command space;
and (iii) assigning command symbols to valid entries in the representation, such
that a given one of the command symbols uniquely identifies a particular combination
of commands in the reduced command space. The switch transmits a given command
symbol to the wireless terminal, and the wireless terminal decodes the symbol and
executes the corresponding commands specified by the symbol. Since the command
symbols can be represented using significantly fewer bits than would otherwise
be required using the complete wired terminal protocol, the invention allows the
switch to control the wireless terminal in a bandwidth-efficient manner, while
still providing substantially the full functionality of the wired terminal protocol
at the wireless terminal.
