Patent ID: 8705340

Claim:
A method of packet-loss handling, the method comprising: transmitting, by a wireless access point configured to operate in a downlink multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (DL MU-MIMO) wireless networking environment, a DL MU-MIMO burst via a MU-MIMO wireless network to a DL MU-MIMO group of wireless stations; determining whether the DL MU-MIMO burst transmission was fully successful; performing one or more packet-loss adjustments; determining whether the DL MU-MIMO burst transmission was at least partially successful; performing a failure backoff in response to a determination that the burst transmission was not even partially successful and before the sending of another DL MU-MIMO burst transmission, wherein a partially successful burst transmission is one where at least one station responds with an acknowledgment to a packet sent as part of the DL MU-MIMO burst transmission, the performing the failure backoff includes: setting a contention window to a value incrementally or exponentially greater than its immediately previous value but not exceeding a designated maximum contention window value for a type of traffic that is being transmitted represented by CW[AC]=(CW[AC]+1)*2−1, where AC is the type of traffic and CW[AC] is the contention window for the type of traffic; initiating a backoff timer; and after a backoff time period expires, sending a next DL MU-MIMO burst transmission.