MANAGING COMMUNICATIONS OVER A SHARED MEDIUM

摘要

Communicating among stations in a network includes, from each of multiple stations in the network, transmitting information indicating which other stations from which that station is able to reliably receive transmissions. A schedule for communicating among the stations is determined based on the information from the stations and the schedule is transmitted over the network. The schedule includes a plurality of time slots during which respective sets of stations are assigned to communicate using a contention-based protocol.