A wireless network may comprise one or more basic service set (BSS) and the basic service sets (BSS) may be coupled to each other by a backbone. A basic service set may comprise stations (STA) and an access point (AP), which may be coupled to the backbone to provide an interface between the STAs within the BSS and the backbone. The stations within a BSS may be coupled to an AP of that BSS and the coupling between the STAs and the AP may be referred to as an AP path. Some mobile stations (service provider stations) of a BSS may provide, for example, print, fax, voice over IP (VoIP), multi-media, and such other services. Some other stations (service consumer STA) may use the services offered by the service provider STA. The service consumer STAs may use a higher layer discovery protocol such as UPnP or ZeroConf to discover service provider STAs. After completion of the discovery, the service consumer STA and the service provider STA may use the AP path to transmit data units.
However, in many usage scenarios, the service consumer STA and the service provider STA may lie within each other's radio range and may be associated with a same AP. If the service consumer and service provider STA operate in a promiscuous mode for some time while exchanging the data units, the service consumer and service provider STAs may discover that they are in the same BSS and may establish a direct link for exchanging data units. However, the higher layer based discovery procedure may incur higher overhead and latency and the power consumed by the STAs while operating in promiscuous mode is significantly higher than that consumed in a normal mode. Also, switching transmission of data from AP path to the direct link may require packet losses and reordering and the switch over may cause delay/jitter.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds