Patent ID: 7826472

Claim:
A method for providing priority access to 802.11 endpoints comprising the steps of: sending an unsolicited Clear To Send (CTS) frame from a designated station without requiring a Request to Send (RTS) frame from a first station, said CTS frame including a field identifying said first station for commencing transmission, and a field indicating a duration; and deferring any transmissions of stations other than said first station until after said duration indicated in said CTS frame has passed, wherein the sending and deferring occur during a contention period wherein said duration is set to: w = ( DIFS+ω+CW min ·t slot ·I (busy)) wherein ω is the range of symmetric jitter in T 0 ; I (busy) is an indicator function that is 1 if the medium is busy at the scheduled beginning of an invitation window and 0 otherwise; w is an invitation window; DIFS is a DCF interframe space; CW min is a minimum contention window size; and t slot is a slot time and t zero is a first packetization interval.