Patent ID: 7551948

Claim:
A method for an 802.11 station to save power, the station switching between a wakeup state and a doze state, the steps comprising: switching to a doze state; switching to a wakeup state; transmitting an uplink frame to an access point; receiving an acknowledgement for the uplink frame from the access point, with a flag set in the acknowledgement to indicate that the access point has frames buffered for the station; receiving a buffered downlink frame from the access point; returning to the doze state only after a flag in the buffered downlink frame indicates that the access point does not have another buffered downlink frame for the station; sensing when the channel is idle; sending at least one uplink frame interleaved in a bidirectional burst of uplink and downlink data frames following the initial channel sense; and sending at least one successive uplink frame without sensing when the channel is idle; wherein the power consumption in the doze state is less than the power consumption in the wakeup state.