Patent ID: 8571041

Claim:
A method for managing transmissions among nodes communicating over a shared communication medium, the method comprising: transmitting a frame from a sender node to a plurality of receiver nodes, the frame including at least a portion of a data packet and control information associated with accessing the communication medium; defining a time window commencing after the data packet of the transmitted frame, the time window allocating a time period for receiving two or more acknowledgement signals, wherein the time window includes two or more time slots, a first time slot within the time window separated from the data packet by an inter-frame gap period and each time slot separated from other time slots by the inter-frame gap period; assigning each time slot in the time window to one or more receiver nodes from the plurality of receiver nodes; and receiving an acknowledgement signal from the one or more receiver nodes during the time slot assigned to the one or more receiver nodes, wherein the acknowledgement signal is responsive to the transmitted frame.