Patent ID: 7154876

Claim:
A method comprising: (a) receiving a polling request that specifies a first temporal period for a plurality of expected future transmissions; (b) transmitting a plurality of polls to the sender of said polling request; (c) receiving a response to at least one of said plurality of polls; (d) estimating a first temporal offset for said first temporal period based on at least one of: (i) when said response was received, and (ii) when at least one of said plurality of polls was transmitted; and (e) establishing a polling schedule based on said first temporal period and said first temporal offset wherein the temporal offset for the temporal period reduces a delay between when a station queues a frame and when a station transmits a frame; (f) receiving a plurality of frames for forwarding to said sender of said polling request; (g) determining whether the arrival times of said frames are in accordance with a second temporal offset and a second temporal period; and (h) establishing, when said arrival times are in accordance with said second temporal offset and said second temporal period, a transmission schedule for transmitting each of said frames to said sender of said polling request; wherein said transmission schedule is based on said second temporal offset and said second temporal period wherein said second response is used since said second response may not include a time required to gain contention based access to a shared communications channel while said first response may include a time required to gain contention based access to a shared communications channel.