Patent ID: 8090857

Claim:
A method of operating in a network in which a plurality of stations communicate over a shared medium, comprising providing a physical layer for handling physical communication over the shared medium; providing a high level layer that receives data from a station and supplies high level data units for transmission over the medium; providing a MAC layer that receives the high level data units from the high level layer and supplies low level data units to the physical layer; at the MAC layer, encapsulating content from a plurality of the high level data units into a stream of sub-frames; dividing the encapsulated stream into a plurality of pieces with each piece capable of being independently retransmitted; and supplying low level data units, at least some of the low level data units each containing a plurality of the pieces into which the encapsulated stream was divided, and at least some of the low level data units containing boundary demarcation information indicating boundaries between the sub-frames in the stream; wherein at least some information common to the high level data units is not repeated for each high level data unit encapsulated in the stream; wherein the high level data units each comprise a payload, and encapsulating comprises forming the stream comprising the payloads from a succession of high level data units; wherein the stream comprises a succession of sub-frames, each sub-frame comprising a header and a plurality of the payloads; wherein each sub-frame is divided into the plurality of pieces capable of being independently retransmitted; and wherein division of a sub-frame into the plurality of pieces comprises dividing the sub-frame into a plurality of sub-blocks, and forming at least some pieces from a plurality of sub-blocks.