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AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsDanny Neil McKay, Mahmoud Naghshineh, Claus Michael Olsen, Babak Rezvani, Parviz Kermani, Peter Dirk Hortensius
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The throughput of a Request-to-Send and Clear-to-Send (RTS/CTS) based distributed media access control protocol is improved by reserving the medium in a hierarchical fashion. The shared medium is reserved for two stations called the participants. During the reserved period, a master (or primary) attribute and a slave (or secondary) attribute are given to the participants and the medium is shared between them using any suitable coordination algorithm. During the reserved time, the secondary can signal the primary station that it has data to send to the primary station and request that the primary and secondary roles or attributes be exchanged. In the case that a role exchange takes place, control of the medium is transferred from one station to another and data transfer in an opposite direction can take place without requiring another reservation. Observing stations which are not participating in the reservation can be invited to join the reservation as additional secondary stations if this does not cause any interference to any other existing reservations. The efficiency of the medium reservation may be improved also by piggy-backing any reservation specific signals onto data packets and by defining new response frames such as Hold-to-Send (HTS) and Free-to-Send (FTS) for flow control when there is a congested receiving station.
An improved communications network having a plurality of stations and a shared common communications medium using a collision avoidance media access protocol for communication between said stations, in which medium access is granted to a pair of stations obtaining a successful reservation of said medium, said pair of stations comprising a requester station and a target station, said requester station comprising a primary station, and said target station comprising a secondary station, wherein said primary station coordinates communication to said secondary station, the improvement comprising:
In a communications network having a plurality of stations and a shared common communications medium using a collision avoidance media access protocol for communication between said stations, in which medium access is granted to a pair of stations obtaining a successful reservation of said medium, said pair of stations comprising a requester station and a target station, said requester station comprising a primary station, and said target station comprising a secondary station, wherein said primary station coordinates communication to said secondary station, other stations in range of said primary station comprising observing stations, the improvement, comprising a method of joining an observing station to a reservation wherein said primary station invites a selected observing station to participate in communication with it;
In a communications network having a plurality of stations and a shared common communications medium using a collision avoidance media access protocol for communication between said stations, in which medium access is granted to a pair of stations obtaining a successful reservation of said medium, said pair of stations comprising a requester station and a target station, wherein said communication medium is reserved based on requester transmission of a Request-to-Send (RTS) control frame and the reply thereto by a target station with a Clear-to-Send control frame when the target station is ready to receive data, a method of transmission control comprising the following steps:
An improved communications method for a communications network having a plurality of stations and a shared common communications medium using a collision avoidance media access protocol for communication between said stations, in which medium access is granted to a pair of stations obtaining a successful reservation of said medium, said pair of stations comprising a requester station and a target station, said requester station comprising a primary station, and said target station comprising a secondary station, wherein said primary station coordinates communication to said secondary station, the improvement comprising the step of:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.