Patent ID: 6898198

Claim:
An apparatus for inclusion in a node of a wireless network, the apparatus comprising: a receiver to receive data from a remote node, including an analog-to-digital converter producing samples of signals received at the node from the remote node, said received signals in the form of packets of data; a demodulator coupled to the receiver to demodulate samples of the signals received at the receiver to produce demodulated signals, the samples at decision points; and an error vector magnitude calculator coupled to the receiver to determine a measure of the signal quality of the decision point samples of the received signal; and a transmitter to transmit data for transmission to the remote node, the transmitter having a settable data rate, the data rate set according to a data rate signal accepted by the transmitter; and a data rate setting processor coupled to the error vector magnitude calculator and to the transmitter and producing the data rate signal for the transmitter, the data rate signal set such the data rate for transmission to a particular remote node is dependent on the measure of the signal quality produced by the error vector magnitude calculator from signals received from the particular remote node, such that the error vector magnitude measure determined by the error vector magnitude calculator can be used to select a data rate for communicating between the node and the remote node, wherein the measure of signal quality is a measure of the error vector magnitude of the received packet, and wherein the data rate processor includes a memory to store for each remote node from which data was received the measure of the error vector magnitude of the last packet received from the remote node, and a running average the measure of the error vector magnitude of the last number of packets received from the remote node.