Patent ID: 8040885

Claim:
A method of establishing a multicast service in a wireless communication system, the method comprising: receiving, by an access point, a request frame from a requesting station including a first delivery interval field indicating a delivery interval which is a period for transmission of a multicast stream in units of Delivery Traffic Indication Maps (DTIMs); and transmitting, by the access point, a response frame in response to the request frame in order to establish a multicast service, the response frame including an identification (ID) field, an element status field, a counter field directly following the ID field, and a rate field directly following the counter field, the ID field indicating a unique identifier for the multicast stream within a Basic Service Set (BSS), the element status field indicating an acceptance of the delivery interval for the multicast stream in the request frame, the rate field indicating a data rate to be used for the multicast service, wherein the counter field includes a counter ID field comprising three bits and a current count field comprising five bits, the counter ID field indicating an identifier for a counter assigned by the access point for the multicast stream, the current count field indicating a count which identifies a DTIM beacon after which the multicast stream assigned to the delivery interval is transmitted.