Patent ID: 8649358

Claim:
A wireless station (STA), comprising: a transceiver operable for communicating in a wireless network, wherein said transceiver is adapted to use signaling that enables said wireless station to communicate necessary information including a desired modulation coding scheme (MCS); wherein said transceiver is capable of communicating with an access point (AP) in said wireless network and is capable of sending to said AP a Clear To Transmit (CTX) frame, said CTX frame including a list of STAs' association identifications (AIDs), and maximum MCS or stream number for each STA; wherein said transceiver is further adapted to enable error handling for uplink multi user multiple input multiple output (UL MU MIMO) wireless stations; wherein error handling for UL MU MIMO wireless stations comprises performing a backoff procedure; wherein when one of said UL MU MIMO transmissions from said transceiver to said AP is not received correctly, if an additional wireless station communicating in said wireless network does not receive a block acknowledgment (BA) for itself but has received BAs for other STAs from said AP, said transceiver will initiate a success backoff by setting contention window (CW)=CWmin since said AP can decode any data frame in said UL MU MIMO transmission and send back at least one BA if there is no collision at the AP, thereby said transceiver should not initiate exponential backoff, and wherein if said transceiver has more traffic to send and has received at least one BA from said AP even if said BA is not intended for itself, it can initiate success backoff and if no BA is received from said AP, said transceiver initiates exponential backoff.