Many applications used in communication systems involve bidirectional data transfer. In bidirectional data transfer applications, a client terminal has to turn on its hardware components such as transmitter at the time of transmitting the data and the receiver at the time of receiving the data. When the transmission and reception of data happens at different time instances, the client terminal has to turn on and off the transmitter, the receiver and other modules at separate time instances. This may lead to increased power consumption. A method and apparatus are disclosed for the modem in a client terminal that bring the transmission and the reception instances close to each other or overlap with each other when performing bidirectional communication. This may reduce the rate at which the client terminal has to turn on and off its transmitter, receiver and other modules which may in turn reduce its power consumption.