The present invention provides a method and
system for efficiently scheduling
wireless LAN traffic, giving the network the ability to serve both real-time and non-real time applications concurrently, while maintaining a requested level of
quality of service for the real time application. It describes a method for scheduling
quality of service traffic and a method to optimize this schedule thereby reducing the overall amount of time that is required for serving
quality of service traffic (which is coordinated by a centralized network coordinator entity) and increasing the bandwidth available for non-real-time traffic. One application of such a scheduler would be WLANs that carry AV streams, such as may be found in a
home based WLAN. Furthermore, a method is provided for announcing the schedule to all nodes in a
wireless network to, for example, implement a power savings feature, thereby optimizing battery life and reducing the size and weight of portable network access terminals.