CHANNEL ACCESS MECHANISM

摘要

A method and system to improve backoff counter handling with relation to a clear channel assessment (CCA) process. The method and system improve a wireless medium availability by adjusting the backoff counter such that the processing of a preamble of a frame received during a backoff is taken into account. Received frames that fall between two CCA thresholds may require decoding of information in the preamble to assess whether the wireless medium is available. A portion of the preamble is decoded that identifies information utilized to determine whether the wireless medium may be considered to be busy. However, during this determination that requires the reading of the preamble of a received frame the backoff counter may be held or decremented even though the wireless medium status is unknown. The method and system provide a set of possible adjustments to the backoff counter to account for this uncertainty and the outcome of the CCA.

主权项

1. A method implemented by a network device, the method to improve efficiency for clear channel assessment (CCA) in a wireless local area network (WLAN) by adjusting a backoff counter to minimize delay caused by decoding a preamble of a received signal, the method comprising:
detecting, on a wireless medium, a start of a frame; decoding a preamble of the frame to determine a basic service set (BSS) associated with a transmitter of the frame; and indicating that the wireless medium is busy while decoding the preamble of the frame.