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Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance for Wireless

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Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance for Wireless

Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance for Wireless (MACAW) is a slotted medium access control (MAC) protocol widely used in ad hoc networks. Furthermore, it is the foundation of many other MAC protocols used in wireless sensor networks (WSN). The IEEE 802.11 RTS/CTS mechanism is adopted from this protocol. It uses RTS-CTS-DS-DATA-ACK frame sequence for transferring data, sometimes preceded by an RTS-RRTS frame sequence, in view to provide solution to the hidden node problem. Although protocols based on MACAW, such as S-MAC, use carrier sense in addition to the RTS/CTS mechanism, MACAW does not make use of carrier sense.

Assume that node A has data to transfer to node B. Node A initiates the process by sending a Request to Send frame (RTS) to node B. The destination node (node B) replies with a Clear To Send frame (CTS). After receiving CTS, node A sends data. After successful reception, node B replies with an acknowledgement frame (ACK). If node A has to send more than one data fragment, it has to wait a random time after each successful data transfer and compete with adjacent nodes for the medium using the RTS/CTS mechanism.

Any node overhearing an RTS frame (for example node F or node E in the illustration) refrains from sending anything until a CTS is received, or after waiting a certain time. If the captured RTS is not followed by a CTS, the maximum waiting time is the RTS propagation time and the destination node turnaround time.

Any node (node C and node E) overhearing a CTS frame refrains from sending anything for the time until the data frame and ACK should have been received (solving the hidden terminal problem), plus a random time. Both the RTS and CTS frames contain information about the length of the DATA frame. Hence a node uses that information to estimate the time for the data transmission completion.

Before sending a long DATA frame, node A sends a short Data-Sending frame (DS), which provides information about the length of the DATA frame. Every station that overhears this frame knows that the RTS/CTS exchange was successful. An overhearing station (node F), which might have received RTS and DS but not CTS, defers its transmissions until after the ACK frame should have been received plus a random time.

To sum up, a successful data transfer (A to B) consists of the following sequence of frames:

MACAW is a non-persistent slotted protocol, meaning that after the medium has been busy, for example after a CTS message, the station waits a random time after the start of a time slot before sending an RTS. This results in fair access to the medium. If for example nodes A, B and C have data fragments to send after a busy period, they will have the same chance to access the medium since they are in transmission range of each other.

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