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US 8,553,580 B2Granted
Multi-radio medium-agnostic access architecture
AssigneeIntel Corporation
InventorHujun Yin
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A multi-radio medium-agnostic access architecture is proposed. The multi-radio medium-agnostic architecture features a medium-agnostic MAC that interfaces between the TCP/IP and the physical layers of user equipment, such as a laptop computer or cellular phone having multiple radios, so that the radios in the user equipment may operate simultaneously, seamlessly, and transparently to higher layers.
Claims16
A medium-agnostic media access control (MAC) embedded within a multiple-radio device, the medium-agnostic MAC comprising:
- a medium-dependent access sub-layer coupled to a plurality of radios in the multiple-radio device, each of the plurality of radios comprising a dedicated MAC that governs the access of its specific physical medium;
- and
- a medium-agnostic access sub-layer comprising:
- a multi-radio resource management function comprising:
- a multi-radio resource measurement function to collect decision metrics based on radio resource measurements taken by the plurality of radios;
- and
- multi-radio connection management function to perform activation of one of the plurality of radios, switching between two of the plurality of radios, and/or aggregates two or more of the plurality of radios, based on the metrics collected by the radio resource measurement function;
- wherein the medium-agnostic MAC provides transparent services to upper layers of a protocol stack, independent of underlying radio operation of the plurality of radios.
5 more elements
User equipment comprising:
- a first radio comprising a media access control (MAC) and a physical (PHY) layer;
- a second radio comprising a second MAC and a second PHY layer;
- and
- a medium-agnostic MAC coupled between the MAC and the second MAC, the medium-agnostic MAC comprising:
- a resource measurement function to perform decision metrics based on radio resource measurements taken by the first radio and the second radio;
- and
- a multi-radio resource sharing and co-existence coordination function to determine, for the first and second radios:
- a required active time pattern of each radio air interface for a given traffic load;
- and
- operation characteristics to avoid conflict among an active radio of the first and second radios.
7 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.