Patent ID: 8717981

Claim:
A method of allocating contention resources, comprising: allocating by an access point a first set of uplink contention slots for use by standard subscriber wireless devices, wherein the first set of uplink contention slots comprises a first subset and a second subset; allocating by the access point a second set of uplink contention slots for use by public safety wireless devices, wherein the second set of uplink contention slots comprises a first subset and a second subset and wherein the second set of uplink contention slots are non-overlapping with the first set of uplink contention slots; communicating by the access point the first set of uplink contention slots to the standard subscriber wireless devices; communicating by the access point the second set of uplink contention slots to the public safety wireless devices; determining a number of public safety wireless devices registered with the access point; determining a number of standard subscriber wireless devices registered with the access point; determining a rate of bandwidth requests from the public safety wireless devices and a rate of bandwidth requests from the standard subscriber wireless devices; re-allocating the first subset of the first set of uplink contention slots to the public safety wireless devices and the standard subscriber wireless devices when the number of public safety wireless devices registered with the access point increases and the rate of bandwidth requests from the public safety wireless devices increases, wherein the public safety wireless devices and the standard subscriber wireless devices share the first subset of the first set of uplink contention slots to request additional slot allocation; re-allocating the first subset of the second set of uplink contention slots to the public safety wireless devices and the standard subscriber wireless devices when the number of standard subscriber wireless devices registered with the access point increases and the rate of bandwidth requests from the standard subscriber wireless devices increases, wherein the public safety wireless devices and the standard subscriber wireless devices share the first subset of the second set of uplink contention slots to request additional slot allocation; communicating by the access point the re-allocated first subset of the first set of uplink contention slots to the public safety wireless devices and the standard subscriber wireless devices when the number of public safety wireless devices registered with the access point increases and the rate of bandwidth requests from the public safety wireless devices increases; and communicating by the access point the re-allocated first subset of the second set of uplink contention slots to the public safety wireless devices and the standard subscriber wireless devices when the number of standard subscriber wireless devices registered with the access point increases and the rate of bandwidth requests from the standard subscriber wireless devices increases.