Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Enhanced Collision Avoidance (CSMA ECA) is a distributed MAC protocol that allows collision-free access to the medium in WLAN. The only difference between CSMA ECA and the well-known CSMA CA is that the former uses a deterministic backoff after successful transmissions. Collision-free operation is reached after a transient state during which some collisions may occur. This article shows that the duration of the transient state can be shortened by appropriately setting the contention parameters. Standard absorbing Markov Chain theory can be used to describe the behaviour of the system in the transient state and to predict the expected number of slots to reach the collision-free operation. The article also introduces CSMA E2CA, in which a deterministic backoff is used two consecutive times after a successful transmission. CSMA E2CA converges quicker to collision-free operation and delivers higher performance than CSMA CA in harsh wireless scenarios with high frame error rates. To achieve collision-free operations when the number of contenders is large, it may be necessary to dynamically adjust the contention parameter. The last part of the article suggests an approach for such parameter adjustment which is validated by simulation results.
ZeroCollision @cite_20 is a MAC protocol that also converges to a collision-free mode of operation. The operation of ZeroCollision is similar to Reservation-Aloha. The slots are grouped in rounds, each round containing @math slots and the stations keep track of the status of each slot (either busy or empty). A station that successfully transmits in the @math -th slot ( @math ) obtains an implicit reservation for that slot. If this station has more packets to transmit, it will use again the @math -th slot in the next transmission round. Those stations that have no reservation, transmit randomly in any of the slots that were empty in the previous round.
@cite_20
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This paper proposes and analyzes a distributed MAC protocol that achieves zero collision with no control message exchange nor synchronization. ZC (ZeroCollision) is neither reservation-based nor dynamic TDMA; the protocol supports variable-length packets and does not lose efficiency when some of the stations do not transmit. At the same time, ZC is not a CSMA; in its steady state, it is completely collision-free. The stations transmit repeatedly in a round-robin order once the convergence state is reached. If some stations skip their turn, their transmissions are replaced by idle @math -second mini-slots that enable the other stations to keep track of their order. Because of its short medium access delay and its efficiency, the protocol supports both real-time and elastic applications. The protocol allows for nodes leaving and joining the network; it can allocate more throughput to specific nodes (such as an access point). The protocol is robust against carrier sensing errors or clock drift. While collision avoidance is guaranteed in a single collision domain, it is not the case in a multiple collision one. However, experiments show ZC supports a comparable amount of goodput to CSMA in a multiple collision domain environment. The paper presents an analysis and extensive simulations of the protocol, confirming that ZC outperforms both CSMA and TDMA at high and low load.