Patent ID: 7826466

Claim:
A method of operating a Media Access Control (MAC) receiver, the method comprising: providing a receive buffer group, the receive buffer group being associated with a plurality of priority levels; allocating each of a plurality of receive buffers to a particular one of the plurality of the priority levels in order of priority level from the highest priority level to the lowest priority level for reception of frame segments of a given priority level in a receive buffer allocated to the given priority level, including determining whether to re-allocate at least one previously allocated receive buffer in the group to a higher priority level than the priority level at which the previously allocated receive buffer was allocated; and maintaining an empty buffer group of empty buffers; wherein allocating includes moving empty buffers from the empty buffer group to the receive buffers group for use as receive buffers in the reception of frame segments, and re-allocating the receive buffers within the receive buffers group when no empty buffer is available in the empty buffer group, wherein re-allocating comprises performing a static re-allocation to re-allocate an unused buffer from a lower priority to a higher of the priority levels within the receive buffers group.