Patent ID: RE43109

Claim:
A method of selectively providing MIMO transmission/reception in a WLAN system, comprising: using a TSPEC reservation and signaling mechanism to instantiate and tear down, dynamically, multi-channel operation in a WLAN; providing an inference algorithm to determine the minimum number of channels required to establish a TSPEC using a MIMO WLAN system; providing specific channel parameters as parameters to be negotiated in the TSPEC; providing frame exchange sequences to be used in Enhanced Distributed Coordinated Access contention based access and to be used in polled access; providing a mechanism wherein an access point makes a decision as to whether to admit MIMO functionality on a given link, wherein a “link”is a set of communications between two specific WLAN stations; and using a frame exchange sequence to request MIMO resources, wherein a station's station management entity, as the requestor, is the entity that initiates a MLMEADDMIMO.request primitive, containing the information regarding the station, and the requested receive and transmit resources, triggers an ADDMIMO Request message sent from the non-AP station's MAC to the AP's HC MAC, which triggers an MLMEADDMIMO.indication primitive from the AP'S MAC to the AP's Station Management Entity, which triggers an MLMEMIMO.response primitive, wherein the MLMEMIMO.response primitive contains the information regarding the decision regarding admission of the transmission of receive/transmission for the number of channels, a schedule, if admitted, and alternate resource allocations, and wherein the MLMEADDMIMO.response primitive in turn is sent as an ADDMIMOResponse frame to the requesting station.