Patent ID: 8125941

Claim:
A method for communicating multiple streams of traffic comprising: transmitting a clear-to-send (CTS) to self transmission; transmitting, as part of a multiple destination burst, aggregated traffic of one or more types to a plurality of mobile stations, the multiple destination burst including a mapping frame and a downlink sequence of data units individually addressed to the mobile stations; receiving a sequence of uplink frames from the mobile stations after the downlink sequence, each uplink frame optionally including QoS data and including a piggyback acknowledgement to acknowledge receipt of an associated one of the data units of the downlink sequence; and transmitting a plurality of downlink acknowledge frames to the mobile stations amongst the sequence of received uplink frames, each downlink acknowledge frame to acknowledge receipt of a preceding one of the uplink frames of the sequence, wherein each acknowledge frame of the plurality is transmitted to a mobile station after receipt of an uplink frame of the sequence of uplink frames and prior to receipt of a next uplink frame of the sequence of uplink frames from another mobile station, wherein each uplink frame of the sequence and its associated acknowledge frame are separated by a short interframe spacing (SIFS), wherein each acknowledge frame and a next uplink frame of the sequence are separated by a spacing greater than or equal to a SIFS, wherein the data units of the downlink sequence are transmitted at times indicated by the mapping frame and are separated by a reduced interframe spacing (RIFS), and wherein the mapping frame and the CTS to self transmission are separated by a point coordination function interframe spacing (PIFS).