Patent ID: 8155052

Claim:
A method of operating a plurality of wireless devices each including a receiver and a transmitter, the method comprising: controlling each device to divide time into a succession of frames, each frame having plural consecutive timeslots, and into a succession of superframes, each superframe comprising at least four frames, wherein, within any superframe, each frame represents a respective hop distance from a base station; wherein one or more of the devices operates as the base station and selects a predetermined frame or frames as its transmission frame; for each device other than the base station, operating its receiver to detect transmissions from other devices and determine the frames on which they are transmitting; for each device other than the base station, operating its transmitter in one or more timeslots of a transmission frame within each superframe, selected according to the signals received from the other devices, and refraining from operating the transmitter in the other frames of the superframe; operating the receiver of each device in at least some of the timeslots of at least the two frames in each superframe that represent hop distances respectively one hop greater and one hop fewer than the hop distance represented by the transmission frame; and refraining from operating the transmitter and the receiver in at least one further frame in each superframe.