Patent ID: 8259655

Claim:
A medium access method for contention and non-contention in a system comprising an access point, a first group of stations for accessing a medium without contention, and a second group of stations for accessing the medium through contention, the medium access method comprising: (a) preparing a contention-free access message for the first group; (b) detecting a transmission time of a contention access message for the second group; (c) embedding the contention-free access message in the contention access message to transmit the embedded message to the first group and the second group during the transmission time of the contention access message; and (d) receiving the contention access message with the embedded contention-free access message at the first group and the second group, and endowing one of the first group and the second group with a priority to attempt access to a medium, wherein, in response to endowing the first group with the priority in step (d), the first group accesses the medium according to access scheduling within the contention-free period, and the second group has a network allocation vector set for the contention-free period to maintain a standby state and the second group attempts to access the medium within a contention period subsequent to the standby state, and wherein the contention-free period comprises a first period for sequentially uploading data of the stations of the first group to an access point, and a second period for sequentially downloading data corresponding to the uploaded data to each of the stations generating the uploaded data.