Patent ID: 8050212

Claim:
A method comprising: detecting rate anomaly suffered by one or more stations in a wireless network, the rate anomaly existing if the one or more stations transmitting or receiving data suffer from throughput degradation, the detecting comprising: collecting information from one or more other stations in the wireless network, the information comprising at least MAC identifiers of the one or more other stations, number of packets heard from each of the one or more other stations, average size of the packets heard, RSSI and data rate of the packets heard, and BSSID of the wireless network; computing airtime consumed by each of the one or more other stations based on the number of packets heard, the average size of the packets heard, and the data rate of the packets heard; determining utilization of a wireless medium by adding airtime consumed by the one or more other stations from the collected information; and ascertaining existence of the rate anomaly, the rate anomaly existing when the utilization of the wireless medium is greater than a threshold and the one or more other stations suffer from throughput degradation; and requesting the one or more stations to activate a repeater function implemented as a software at the one or more stations based on the detecting.