Patent ID: 7133422

Claim:
A method for contending for access to a communications medium to transmit a message of a first traffic category in a system implementing a plurality of backoff counters using a single hardware backoff counter wherein each traffic category has a virtual backoff counter, said method comprising: (1) determining if the hardware backoff counter is idle; (2) initiating a backoff procedure for the message if the hardware backoff counter is idle; (3) if the hardware backoff counter is busy, then: generating a backoff time for the first traffic category; comparing the backoff time for the first traffic category with a backoff time for a second traffic category in the hardware backoff counter; and determining a backoff procedure based on the results of the comparison, wherein the hardware backoff counter is a single hardware backoff counter; (4) if the communications medium is busy, then: updating the values in each virtual backoff counter; selecting a message from a traffic category with a smallest backoff counter; initiating a backoff procedure based on the selected the traffic category with the smallest backoff counter.