Abstract: In a wireless frequency hopping communication system, a protocol, which does not employ carrier sense or collision detect, is provided for allocating bandwidth fairly and efficiently under varying load conditions, wherein a node is permitted random access to the medium bandwidth under light loading conditions and wherein under higher loading conditions a time/bandwidth allocation is made with a portion of the allocation dedicated to inband backhaul tasks by introducing a form of polling, the size of the reserved time/bandwidth allocation being selected based on traffic pattern. Under such heavy load conditions, non-slave traffic is allocated bandwidth in slots as pseudo-slave packets to guarantee a share of the bandwidth. Depending on the activity of the population of packets, including responsiveness and trend of responsiveness, the relative size of the slots is determined.