Woodcock Washburn LLP
Systems and methods for coordinating wireless traffic for heterogeneous wireless devices
In view of the foregoing, the present invention provides a unified software framework or architecture for distributed coordination of wireless devices and radios, referred to as Layer 2.5 Software MAC (or ‘SoftMAC’), which resides between the standard 802.11 MAC layer (Layer 2) and IP layer (Layer 3) to regulate and control the amount of traffic (both real-time and “best effort”) delivered to 802.11 MAC DCF interfaces. The software based design can be ported to different OS platforms and systems and is capable of handling new hardware interfaces and MAC mechanisms (e.g., 802.11e) with only a software upgrade. The invention thus provides a natural way to make end systems support coordination of different radios of device(s), achieving better performance. Advantages of the 2.5 layer software MAC in accordance with the invention include: (a) there are no hardware constraints; (b) heterogeneous wireless/radio support is provided at the 2.5 layer; and (c) an evolutionary and extensible solution with the ability to support future wireless MAC/PHY chip combinations.
Microsoft Corporation
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Qian Haitao Yunxin
Zhang Wu Liu