Patent ID: 8116245

Claim:
A method of reducing power consumption of a wireless local area network (LAN) device complying with the IEEE 802.1 in standard, the method comprising: (a) receiving at the wireless LAN device a high throughput (HT) frame complying with a TGnSync Alliance standard while the wireless LAN device is in a reception mode; (b) judging whether the received HT frame is decodable by the wireless LAN device based on whether the wireless LAN device supports at least one transmission characteristic of the HT frame; (c) if it is judged that the received HT frame is not decodable by the wireless LAN device, switching the wireless LAN device into a standby mode from the reception mode, and maintaining the wireless LAN device in the standby mode for a duration of the HT frame; and (d) if it is judged that the received HT frame is decodable by the wireless LAN device, maintaining the wireless LAN device in the reception mode, and decoding the HT frame at the wireless LAN device, wherein a PHY header of the HT frame comprises at least a legacy signal field (L-SIG field) and an HT signal field (HT-SIG field), and wherein the L-SIG field includes a RATE field for informing a legacy device of a transmission rate for the legacy device, and wherein the HT-SIG field includes a modulation coding scheme (MCS) field informing an HT device of the transmission characteristics of the HT frame, and an HT LENGTH field informing the HT device of size of a MAC protocol data unit (MPDU) of the HT frame.