Patent ID: 7668137

Claim:
A method to allocate a downlink channel for a plurality of nodes in a wireless network, wherein one of the plurality of nodes is an originating node and the remaining of the plurality of nodes are downstream nodes, comprising: sending, by the originating node, a reservation packet to the plurality of downstream nodes, wherein the reservation packet specifies a plurality of channels; responding, by each of the downstream nodes that are one hop away from the originating node, to the reservation packet; sending, by each of the responding downstream nodes, a predetermined number of packets to the originating node for each of the plurality of channels; deducing, by the originating node, a packet error rate for each of the plurality of channels for each of the responding downstream node, wherein the packet error rate is based on a number of packets without error received by the originating node compared to the predetermined number of packets sent by the corresponding downstream node to the originating node; determining, by the originating node, a best quality channel based on the packet error rates; sending, by the originating node, a message with the best quality channel to each of the responding downstream nodes; and changing, by each of the responding downstream nodes, an uplink to the best quality channel in the message.