Patent ID: 8509229

Claim:
A relay station for receiving a packet transmitted from a sending station and relaying said packet to a receiving station, the relay station comprising: a packet receiver configured to receive a packet fragmented in said sending station; a packet fragmenting unit configured to selectively further refragment said packet received by said packet receiver into a plurality of refragmented packets; a controller configured to add a sequence number to each of said refragmented packets and to a packet not refragmented in said packet fragmenting unit; and a packet transmitting unit configured to transmit to said receiving station each of said packets to which said sequence number has been added by said controller, wherein the sequence number is incremented by one independently for each of connections every time the sequence number is added to each of said refragmented packets and to said packet not refragmented in said packet fragmenting unit, each of the connections being associated with at least one of a destination of the packet and a QoS (Quality of Service) class of the packet, wherein the packet fragmenting unit does not refragment said received packet when the QoS class of said received packet is higher than a predetermined reference QoS or payload of said received packet is encrypted.