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MACAW: a media access protocol for wireless LAN's

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Published:01 October 1994Publication History

ABSTRACT

In recent years, a wide variety of mobile computing devices has emerged, including portables, palmtops, and personal digital assistants. Providing adequate network connectivity for these devices will require a new generation of wireless LAN technology. In this paper we study media access protocols for a single channel wireless LAN being developed at Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center. We start with the MACA media access protocol first proposed by Karn [9] and later refined by Biba [3] which uses an RTS-CTS-DATA packet exchange and binary exponential back-off. Using packet-level simulations, we examine various performance and design issues in such protocols. Our analysis leads to a new protocol, MACAW, which uses an RTS-CTS-DS-DATA-ACK message exchange and includes a significantly different backoff algorithm.

References

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  1. MACAW: a media access protocol for wireless LAN's

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        • Published in

          cover image ACM Conferences
          SIGCOMM '94: Proceedings of the conference on Communications architectures, protocols and applications
          October 1994
          328 pages
          ISBN:0897916824
          DOI:10.1145/190314
          • cover image ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review
            ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review  Volume 24, Issue 4
            Oct. 1994
            318 pages
            ISSN:0146-4833
            DOI:10.1145/190809
            • Editor:
            • David Oran
            Issue’s Table of Contents

          Copyright © 1994 ACM

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          Publication History

          • Published: 1 October 1994

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          SIGCOMM '94 Paper Acceptance Rate29of141submissions,21%Overall Acceptance Rate554of3,547submissions,16%

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