Home phone line network architecture

Home phone line network devices, conforming to different versions of the standards, are interconnected and interoperable on a UTP transmission medium (12). Higher order devices support an overlaid dual logical network structure which allows two pairs of higher order devices to communicate simultaneously using two separate frequency bands. A higher order node contains a high speed PHY (34), a low speed PHY (32), and either a high (28) and low order MAC (24) or an enhanced MAC (38) capable of supporting dual frequency band transmission, thereby enhancing total system throughput to the sum of the throughputs of each logical network. Throughput is further enhanced by prepending a low symbol rate PHY frame header to a data packet. The PHY frame header includes a short training sync field and transmitter parameter header that contains sufficient parametric information for a receiver to efficiently adapt its internal receive parameters to achieve a desired data rate given a desired error rate performance. An efficient protocol grants access and allocating bandwidth resources to multiple nodes of differing capabilities on a local area network. Network resources are divided into fixed time-length slots and network nodes are granted access to particular numbers of time slots according to their bandwidth and service quality requirements. Access and resource allocation is made by a particular network node configured or identified as a network manager, which develops a bandwidth allocation map and provides the map to all of the other nodes coupled to the network on a broadcast basis. Network nodes subsequently communicate with one another during their allocated time periods.