Patent ID: 8917743

Claim:
A method of wireless communication, comprising: reserving a transmission period for simultaneously transmitting data to multiple intended receiving wireless stations on multiple downlink spatial streams over a wireless communication medium; wherein reserving the transmission period comprises: generating a multi-user request-to-send (MU-RTS) frame including: a receiver address (RA) field that comprises a compressed RA field, wherein the compressed RA field comprises compressed addresses for the multiple receiving stations; an indication field that indicates the RTS frame as an MU-RTS without altering the RTS frame type/subtype; and transmitting the MU-RTS frame to the multiple receiving stations, wherein the compressed RA field comprises: compatibility information for differentiating compressed addresses from any actual address in the wireless network, and a bit, wherein first setting of bit representing information that indicates that the compressed RA field represents an individual receiver station address, and second setting of the bit representing information that indicates that the compressed RA field represents compressed addresses for multiple receiver station addresses.