The throughput of a Request-to-Send and Clear-to-Send (RTS/CTS) based distributed media access control protocol is improved by reserving the medium in a hierarchical fashion. The shared medium is reserved for two stations called the participants. During the reserved period, a master (or primary) attribute and a slave (or secondary) attribute are given to the participants and the medium is shared between them using any suitable coordination algorithm. During the reserved time, the secondary can signal the primary station that it has data to send to the primary station and request that the primary and secondary roles or attributes be exchanged. In the case that a role exchange takes place, control of the medium is transferred from one station to another and data transfer in an opposite direction can take place without requiring another reservation. Observing stations which are not participating in the reservation can be invited to join the reservation as additional secondary stations if this does not cause any interference to any other existing reservations. The efficiency of the medium reservation may be improved also by piggy-backing any reservation specific signals onto data packets and by defining new response frames such as Hold-to-Send (HTS) and Free-to-Send (FTS) for flow control when there is a congested receiving station.