Medium Access Control

MAC protocols:
design goals, challenges,
contention-based
and contention-free protocols

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 Why do we need MAC protocols?
• Wireless medium is shared
• Many nodes may need to access the wireless medium to send
or receive messages
• Concurrent message transmissions may interfere with each
other => collisions => message drops
• A MAC protocol is needed to allow the efficient sharing of the
wireless medium by multiple nodes

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 Design goals
• To ensure reliable communication across wireless links
(not end-to-end reliability, only 1-hop reliability)
• To maximize the use of available bandwidth
(keep control overhead as low as possible)
• To ensure fair bandwidth allocation to contending nodes
• To minimize delay of sending/receiving messages
• To minimize energy-consumption of sending/receiving
messages

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 Challenges
• Error-prone channel
• Limited bandwidth
• Limited communication range
• Limited energy (for remote battery-powered nodes)
• Node mobility
• Lack of central coordination
• Lack of tight time synchronisation

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 Protocol classification
• Contention-based MAC protocols
– Contention arises when two or more nodes attempt to transmit at the
same time over a shared channel.
– A contention-based protocol assumes that packet collisions may
occur, and tries to detect, avoid or deal with them.
• Contention-free MAC protocols
– A contention-free protocol tries to divide the wireless channel into
logical channels that do not interfere with each other (e.g. TDMA,
FDMA, CDMA).
– Nodes transmit packets using different logical channels, and as a
result, there is no contention in the network.
– Contention-free schemes are more applicable to fixed networks or
networks with centralized control.
• In this course, we focus on contention-based MAC protocols

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 Some contention-based protocols
• ALOHA, slotted-ALOHA
• CSMA
• MACA
• MACAW
• IEEE 802.11 (DCF)
• …

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 ALOHA, slotted-ALOHA
• Pure ALOHA
– Nodes access the channel when they have data to transmit.
– If a transmission is unsuccessful (e.g. no ACK is sent from
the destination node), the source node retransmits after a
random amount of time.

• Slotted-ALOHA
– Time is divided into equal size slots
– A node transmission always starts at the beginning of a slot
– If a transmission is unsuccessful, the source node
retransmits at a future slot with a certain probability.

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 ALOHA slotted-ALOHA

Node 1
Node 2
Node 3
Node 4
Node 5
Node 6
Node 7

time time

successful packet
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unsuccessful packet
 CSMA - physical sensing

• CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access)

– The sender first senses the wireless channel
– If the channel is idle, the sender starts transmitting
– If the channel is in use the sender refrains itself from
transmission until the channel is idle.

• CSMA/CA (CSMA with Collision Avoidance)

– If the channel is busy before transmission then the
transmission is deferred for a "random" interval.
– This reduces the probability of collisions on the channel.

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 CSMA/CA implementation
• Before transmitting a frame, a node senses the channel
• If the channel is idle for longer than DIFS (Distributed Interframe
Space), the node continues with its transmission.
• Otherwise, if the medium is busy, the transmission is deferred until the
end of the ongoing transmission. Then a backoff procedure is started.

FRAME Node 1 finds the channel idle and transmits

Node 1

Node 2 finds the channel busy and defers transmission

Node 2

Node 3 finds the channel busy and defers transmission

Node 3
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DIFS
 CSMA/CA implementation - backoff
• A random interval - backoff time - is selected and used to initialize the
backoff timer.
• The backoff timer is
– decreased as long as the channel is idle,
– paused when a transmission is detected, and
– reactivated when the channel is sensed as idle again for more than DIFS
• When the backoff timer reaches 0, the node retries to send its frame.
FRAME
Node 1
backoff backoff backoff backoff
started paused resumed ended
FRAME
Node 2

backoff backoff
started ended
FRAME
Node 3
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DIFS DIFS DIFS
 CSMA/CA implementation - backoff
• Binary Exponential Backoff (BEB)

– The backoff time is an integer number of slots uniformly chosen in

the interval (0,CW-1), where CW is the Contention Window.

– At the first transmission attempt, CW=CWmin and it is doubled at

each retransmission up to CWmax

– After a successful transmission, CW is reset to CWmin

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 CSMA/CA with ACK
• Acknowledgement scheme:
– The destination node waits for SIFS (Short Interframe Space) after
receiving a frame. Typically, SIFS is shorter than DIFS.
– The destination node sends an ACK to the source node.

FRAME
Source

ACK
Destination
DIFS SIFS

• If the source node does not get an ACK, it considers the

transmission to be unsuccessful, waits for EIFS (Extended
Interframe Space) and activates the backoff algorithm.
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 The exposed node problem
CSMA may cause nodes to unnecessarily refrain from
accessing the medium.

A B C D

B transmits to A.
C hears the transmission from B to A.
C unnecessarily refrains from sending a message to D
even though no collision would occur.
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 The hidden node problem
CSMA does not avoid the hidden node problem.

B C B C

A A
A transmits to B. A tries to transmit to B.
B receives the message. C also tries to transmit to B.
C does not hear the transmission. Both messages are dropped at B.
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 MACA – virtual sensing

• MACA (Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance)

[Karn 1990]
• Nodes reserve the channel using control messages
(virtual sensing):
– The sender first expresses its wish to transmit by sending a
Request-To-Send (RTS) message
– The receiver allows this transmission by sending a Clear-To-
Send (CTS) message
– The sender then sends the Data message

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 RTS-CTS handshake
CTS

RTS CTS Data

B C B C B C

A A A

A sends RTS to B.
B sends a CTS to A (C overhears it).
A sends Data to B.

Both RTS and CTS carry information about the duration

of the Data transmission. 17
 RTS-CTS handshake
• If control (RTS-CTS) messages collide with each other or with
data packets, a backoff procedure is activated (backoff is
binary exponential).

• RTS-CTS helps to avoid some cases of the hidden and

exposed node problems, because:
– All neighbors of the sender hear the RTS.
– All neighbors of the receiver hear the CTS.

• However, it does not always avoid these problems!

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 MACAW

• MACAW [Bharghavan et al. 1994] extends MACA

– RTS-CTS-DS-Data-ACK

RTS

CTS

DS

Data

ACK
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 MACAW

• MACAW extends MACA with

• acknowledgements
• an improved backoff mechanism
=> fair allocation of the medium to contending nodes
• DS (Data Sending) message:
– Say that a neighbor of the sender overhears an
RTS but not a CTS (from the receiver)
– In this case it can’t tell if RTS-CTS was successful
or not
– When it overhears the DS, it realizes that the RTS-
CTS was successful, and it defers its own
transmission

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 IEEE 802.11
• Standard MAC and physical protocol for wireless LANs
• The MAC layer offers two types of services:
– Distributed Coordination Function (DCF)
– Point Coordination Function (PCF)

contention-free
services contention
services
PCF
DCF

Physical Layer
• DCF combines
– physical sensing (CSMA/CA) and
– virtual sensing (RTS-CTS-Data-ACK)
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 IEEE 802.11 DCF - virtual sensing
• RTS and CTS include the busy channel duration
• Nodes that overhear RTS/CTS set timer NAV (Network
Allocation Vector) to the busy channel duration
• A node starts backoff after NAV becomes zero

RTS Frame
Source node

CTS ACK
Destin. node

NAV RTS Backoff Time

Another node
NAV CTS 22
DIFS SIFS SIFS
 802.11 standards
• 802.11 (1997): First WLAN standard by IEEE
– 2.4GHz (unregulated)
– 2 Mbps – too slow for most applications
• 802.11b (1999)
– 2.4 GHz, interference from microwave ovens, cordless phones, etc.
– 11 Mbps
• 802.11g (2002-2003)
– 2.4 GHz, backwards compatible with 802.11b
– 54 Mbps
• 802.11n (2009)
– MIMO: multiple wireless antennas in tandem to transmit and receive
– +100 Mbps
• 802.11ac (2014)
– 5 GHz band, up to 7Gbps
– Multi user MIMO

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 Contention-free multiple access
• TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access)
– Time is divided into timeslots
– Nodes transmit one after the other using their own timeslot
– TDMA requires good time synchronization
• FDMA (Frequency Division Multiple Access)
– The available bandwidth is divided into multiple frequency channels /
bands.
– A transmitter-receiver pair uses a dedicated frequency channel for
communication
• CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access)
– Every transmitter uses the entire spectrum (not a specific frequency)
– The transmissions are differentiated through a unique code assigned
to each node (that is independent of the data being transmitted)

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 IEEE 802.11 PCF
• IEEE 802.11 PCF (Point Coordination Function)
• One node, called Access Point (AP), coordinates the
transmissions of its neighbors
• The AP polls neighbors one after the other, and allows them to
transmit in a round robin manner
• PCF is not suitable for large multi-hop networks

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 Bluetooth
• Piconet: One node, called the master can communicate with up
to 7 nodes called the slaves
• Bluetooth uses 79 channels (each 1 MHz wide) and changes
channels up to 1600 times per second
• Each channel is divided into time slots of 625 μsecs
• The master switches from slave to slave in a round-robin
fashion
– Time-Division Duplex (TDD): master (downlink) and slave (uplink)
transmissions occur in alternative slots
– Slaves can talk back to the master immediately after they are polled
by the master

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 Summary
Contention-based protocols
– Aloha, slotted-Aloha: no physical sensing
– CSMA: physical sensing
– CSMA/CA: physical sensing and backoff
– MACA and MACAW: virtual sensing using control packets
(RTS/CTS)
– IEEE 802.11 DCF: physical and virtual sensing

Contention-free protocols
– IEEE 802.11 PCF
– Bluetooth
– …

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 Related reading
• Standard textbook:
– Section 2.3
– Section 2.5
– Sections 6.1-6.5.1

• Internet sources:
– http://www.utdallas.edu/~mxw013200/MAC_ADHOC.html
– http://sss-mag.com/pdf/802_11tut.pdf
– http://attila.sdsu.edu/~kumar/MAC_Survey.pdf

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