Patent ID: 8238287

Claim:
A wireless client comprising hardware effecting: a signaling engine of the hardware operable to receive a discovery data packet configured to determine an identity of a wireless client; a negotiation engine operable to: a) generate and send a discovery response data packet to a querying system, the discovery response data packet including capability information associated with the wireless client; and b) receive a configuration packet containing configuration data related to one or more transmission parameters of the wireless client, the transmission parameters relating to a network quality of service (QoS), the configuration data being determined by the querying system; a control engine operable to configure the one or more transmission parameters of the wireless client using the configuration packet; and a congestion quality meter engine operable to generate and send a congestion quality metric to the querying system, the congestion quality metric representing packet traffic congestion as measured at the wireless client, wherein the congestion quality meter engine is operable to generate the congestion quality metric based on a number of packet transmission retries or a received signal strength, and the congestion quality metric is generated based on the following equation: CQ ⁡ ( t ) = a ⁢ ⁢ 1 * ⅆ ⅆ t ⁢ ( RC ⁡ ( t ) ) + a ⁢ ⁢ 2 ⁢ ⅆ 2 ⅆ t ⁢ ⁢ 2 ⁢ ( ( RC ⁡ ( t ) ) + b ⁢ ⁢ 1 * ⅆ ⅆ t ⁢ ( RSSI ⁡ ( t ) ) + b ⁢ ⁢ 2 * ⅆ 2 ⅆ t ⁢ ⁢ 2 ⁢ ( RSSI ⁡ ( t ) ) , where CQ(t) represents the congestion quality metric, RC(t) represents the number of packet transmission retries, RSSI(t) represents the received signal strength, and coefficients a1, a2, b1, b2 are scalars.