Patent ID: 8305897

Claim:
An ingress station that resides in a wireless communication access path in a wireless communication environment, wherein a tunnel is established with an egress station through one or more intermediate relay stations along the wireless communication access path, the ingress station comprising: wireless communication circuitry; and a control system associated with the wireless communication circuitry and adapted to: receive a plurality of packet data units associated with at least one service flow that is supported by the tunnel; and for each packet data unit of the plurality of packet data units: identify quality of service (QoS) class information bearing on a QoS class for the packet data unit; determine an egress station delivery deadline on or before which the egress station should deliver the packet data unit toward a destination of the packet data unit; and deliver the packet data unit with the QoS class information and the egress station delivery deadline to an intermediate relay station of the one or more relay stations via the tunnel.