Patent ID: 8351997

Claim:
An apparatus comprising a first communications device comprising: a processor; a signal processing circuit coupled to the processor to communicate wirelessly with a second communications device; a power control circuit coupled to the processor and the signal processing circuit; wherein the power control circuit is configured to place the signal processing circuit into a non-operational mode for a sleep interval; wherein the first communications device is configured to communicate wirelessly with a second communications device in a wireless network; and determine an amount of data in a transmit queue after a previous communications sequence; and wherein the sleep interval is based at least partly on the determined amount of data in the transmit queue; and wherein the transmit queue is of the second communications device and it is determined there is no data in the transmit queue, the first communications device being further configured to determine the sleep interval as (MAXFD−ECAD) or (ETADXQS−ECAD), whichever is smaller, where MAXFD is a maximum flow delay, ECAD is an estimated channel access delay, and ETADXQS is an estimated time to accumulate desired transmit queue size.