Patent ID: 8654639

Claim:
A method of operating a wireless receiver comprising: receiving frames from a wireless transmitting station; and when buffer overflow conditions are met, mimicking degraded radio conditions for at least a subset of the frames received to induce a rate adaptation mechanism at the transmitting station; wherein mimicking degraded radio conditions comprises: stopping acknowledging of at least a subset of the frames received at one or more data rates by applying a mask to a list of accepted data rates to remove the one or more data rates from the list, the mask defining at least one of a set of rates to be excluded from the list of accepted data rates or a set of rates which are to be included within the list of accepted data rates, wherein the mask is applied for frames exceeding a threshold size; and dropping the frames exceeding the threshold size according to the masked list of accepted data rates, wherein the one or more data rates do not include a data rate at which beacons are transmitted and do include all mandatory data rates which exceed the data rate at which beacons are transmitted.