Patent ID: 7852796

Claim:
A wireless communication device for distributed multichannel time division multiple access communication over a wireless medium in a wireless communication network, comprising: a topology module configured to determine a network topology for the wireless communication network; a timeslot and channel allocation module configured to (i) dynamically identify and assign a non-overlapping wireless communication channel out of a plurality of available non-overlapping wireless communication channels for transmission of packets over the wireless medium to each neighboring wireless device identified by the topology module and (ii) dynamically identify and assign each non-overlapping wireless communication channel to a timeslot selected out of a plurality of available timeslots for transmission of packets over the wireless medium to each neighboring wireless device identified by the topology module; a packet queuing module configured to provide a plurality of first queues, each first queue corresponding to and queuing packets only for a particular one of the non-overlapping wireless communication channels, the packet queuing module further configured to route packets to a proper first queue for transmission to a target neighboring wireless device over the wireless medium based on the non-overlapping wireless communication channel currently assigned to the target neighboring wireless device by the channel allocation module; a channel switching module configured to switch wireless communication channels between the plurality of available wireless communication channels in accordance with the non-overlapping wireless communication channel assigned to a current timeslot; and a transmit module for transmitting queued packets from respective first queues during corresponding timeslots.