Patent ID: 7664089

Claim:
A system comprising: a network congestion monitoring module for monitoring a congestion-related metric of a wireless medium, the congestion-related metric being based on traffic class; a contention-period/contention-free-period (CP/CFP) adaptation module coupled to the network congestion monitoring module for generating CP/CFP information in response to the at least one congestion-related metric; a point coordinator module coupled to the CP/CFP adaptation module for coordinating access to the wireless medium using a point coordination function based on the CP/CFP information; and a distributed coordinator module coupled to the CP/CFP adaptation module for coordinating access to the wireless medium using a distributed coordination function based on the CP/CFP information; wherein the CP/CFP adaptation module computes a normalized contention-window metric based on the function CW ⁢ _ ⁢ avg = [ a 1 · CW — ⁢ VO + a 2 · CW — ⁢ VI ] [ a 3 · CW — ⁢ BE + a 4 · CW — ⁢ BK ] , where CW_VO is an average contention window for voice traffic of substantially all wireless stations in a service set, CW_VI is an average contention window for video traffic of substantially all wireless stations in the service set, CW_BE is an average contention window for best effort traffic of substantially all wireless stations in the service set, CW_BK is an average contention window for background traffic of substantially all wireless stations in the service set, and a1, ct2, a3 and a4 are weight values based on traffic class.