Patent ID: 7881274

Claim:
A processing system that minimizes the latency associated with medium access control protocol layer processing for a medium access control protocol that combines contention-free and contention-based medium access control protocols into a heterogeneous medium access control protocol used for forwarding Internet Protocol packets containing voice traffic, signaling traffic, and application data traffic between a base station and mobile nodes in a voice over internet protocol system on a wireless network comprising: A base station in electrical communication with the Internet; one or more mobile nodes in wireless electrical communication with said base station; said base station and said one or more mobile nodes each having a medium access control protocol; said medium access control protocol having super-frames of equal intervals of time; each of said super-frames made up of an initial time for contention-free timeslot based access voice traffic and a remainder time for contention-based access signaling traffic and application data traffic; said base station capable of dynamically determining a time duration of said super-frames and said initial time for contention-free timeslot based access based on a packetization interval determined by the duration of the voice traffic in said Internet Protocol packets; and, said base station having three concurrently running processors comprised of an Ethernet processor which acts as the interface to the Internet, a medium access control processor that processes tasks associated with Internet Protocol packets, and an air interface processor which acts as the interface to wireless links.