Patent ID: 7428241

Claim:
A medium access control (MAC) protocol for use in a communications network having a plurality of nodes and a communication medium, each node having a normalized packet transmission rate R i and a packet transmission time B i , the protocol comprising: delaying a packet transmission from at least one node i for a backoff window consisting of a random integer number of timeslots if the node i determines that the communication medium is in use, wherein the number of timeslots is uniformly distributed over an interval defined by [0, BW], where BW is a constant; and inserting an inter-transmission gap G i between each consecutive packet transmission from the node i, where the duration of the inter-transmission gap is dependent upon the normalized packet transmission rate for the node i and the packet transmission time for the node i, and the normalized packet transmission rate is adjusted based on whether a prior packet transmission attempt from the node i is acknowledged as successful.