Patent ID: 11963224
Assignee: SONY GROUP CORPORATION
Field: Digital communication (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC H | IPC H

Claim 0:
1. An apparatus for wireless communication in a network, the apparatus comprising:
(a) a wireless communication circuit, as a wireless station (STA) as either an Access Point (AP) or a non-AP STA, is configured for wirelessly communicating over a channel with other wireless stations (STAs), which are either APs or non-AP STAs, on a wireless local area network (WLAN) in which packets carry frames;
(b) a processor coupled to said wireless communication circuit for operating on the WLAN as a STA;
(c) a non-transitory memory storing instructions executable by the processor for communicating with other STAs; and
(d) wherein said instructions, when executed by the processor, perform one or more steps comprising:
(i) initiating a non-zero backoff procedure by setting a backoff counter to a random value greater than or equal to at least one backoff slot in starting to contend for a channel;
(ii) counting down said backoff counter depending on channel conditions;
(iii) accessing the channel when the backoff counter reaches zero; and
(iv) wherein a STA using said non-zero backoff procedure for an Access Class (AC) sets an Arbitration Inter-Frame Spacing (AIFS) time to an amount less than that utilized for a legacy backoff procedure which is not using the non-zero backoff procedure.