Patent ID: 7245604

Claim:
A method for reducing interference between overlapping first and second wireless LAN cells in a medium, each cell including a respective plurality of member stations, comprising: coordinating by a first member station in the first cell a first contention-free session, said session including multiple bursts with other member stations in the first cell, and retaining control of the medium by said first member station by using interframe spaces sufficiently short between the bursts that the multiple bursts appear to contending stations to be a single instance of activity in the medium during a session until an end of a session; setting by the first member station a backoff timer to a fixed deterministic post-backoff delay, which has a value of Bkoff times a fixed number of idle time slots, the value of Bkoff being greater than a number of overlapping cells; counting down the backoff timer by the first member station; transmitting a second contention-free session by the first member station when the backoff timer expires; and resetting the backoff timer to the value of Bkoff to start a new cycle.