US 12,342,392 B2
Sharing an EDCA TXOP with RTA traffic
Liangxiao Xin, San Jose, CA (US); Mohamed Abouelseoud, San Francisco, CA (US); Li-Hsiang Sun, San Jose, CA (US); and Qing Xia, San Jose, CA (US)
Assigned to SONY GROUP CORPORATION, Tokyo (JP); and SONY CORPORATION OF AMERICA, New York, NY (US)
Filed by SONY GROUP CORPORATION, Tokyo (JP)
Filed on Oct. 24, 2021, as Appl. No. 17/509,017.
Claims priority of provisional application 63/168,434, filed on Mar. 31, 2021.
Prior Publication US 2022/0322460 A1, Oct. 6, 2022
Int. Cl. H04W 74/08 (2024.01); H04W 84/12 (2009.01)
CPC H04W 74/0866 (2013.01) [H04W 84/12 (2013.01)] 15 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. An apparatus for wireless communication in a network, the apparatus comprising:
(a) a wireless station (STA) operating as either an access point (AP) or a non-AP STA, is configured for wirelessly communicating packets which carry frames over a channel with other wireless stations (STAs), which are either APs or non-AP STAs, on a wireless local area network (WLAN) in which enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) is applied to more than one Access Category (AC);
(b) a processor within said STA;
(c) a non-transitory memory storing instructions executable by the processor for communicating with other STAs; and
(d) wherein said instructions, when executed by the processor, perform steps comprising:
(i) distinguishing real time application (RTA) traffic from non-RTA traffic using a low latency traffic stream (LLTS) operation to differentiate between an RTA traffic stream and other traffic;
(ii) a requesting STA establishing an LLTS setup by sending an LLTS request frame having an action field specifying: category, QoS action, dialog token and LLTS request element which includes an RTA specification element (TSPEC) indicating attributes for the RTA, which is sent from the requesting STA through its station management entity (SME) to its medium access control (MAC) sublayer management entity (MLME) communicating this request message to an MLME of a recipient STA which collects information from MLME-LLTS request message and sends this to a recipient STA which generates an MLME-LLTS indication message to its SME or the SME of its affiliated MLD; wherein an SME of the recipient STA processes the LLTS request and sends an MLME-LLTS response message comprising LLTS setup results to its MLME, wherein the MLME of the recipient sends an LLTS response frame to the requesting STA, which sends an MLME-LLTS confirmation message to its SME or the SME of its affiliated MLD; wherein in response to information received in these frames it can be determined if the LLTS setup has been successful or not;
(iii) obtaining a transmit opportunity (TXOP) of a primary AC including TXOP channel resources;
(iv) utilizing a remainder of the TXOP channel resources to transmit RTA frames, determined by the TSPEC element of the LLTS, from non-primary ACs even though there may be frames from the primary AC that have not been transmitted during the TXOP; and
(v) wherein said LLTS can be modified or terminated by the recipient STA at any time.