Patent ID: 7508780

Claim:
A method of transitioning a plurality of wireless devices between a plurality of states having increasing resource intensity from a least resource intensive state to a most resource intensive second state comprising: ranking all power-on wireless devices from highest priority to lowest priority; assigning a respective subset of the power-on wireless devices to each state based on the ranking of all power-on wireless devices, such that the priorities of power-on wireless devices of the subset assigned to a more resource intensive state of the plurality of states are higher than the priorities of power-on wireless devices of a subset assigned to a less resource intensive state of the plurality of states; and signalling to the wireless devices to instruct them to implement any change in state; wherein the states are MAC (media access control) states; and wherein the ranking is performed as a function of a selected data rate, an average throughput, a minimum required data rate, a minimum packet deadline, a buffer empty time, and a drop rate for each user.