Abstract
This chapter describes the standards for the 802.11 media access control (MAC) protocol. The 802.11 MAC uses a technique called Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA). CSMA/CA is a contention protocol, which means that all of the stations are vying or contending to access the channel. The result of that contention is the possibility that transmissions can collide, in which case they must be resent. The 802.11 MAC is based roughly on Ethernet's Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) protocol. Despite the similarity of the names, CSMA/CA defines a very different mode of operation. Early on, wireless LAN designers found that they could not simply take these wired LAN approaches and transplant them to the wireless domain. One basic reason is the problem of collision detection. The big lesson to take away from this is that wireless LANs were designed for the requirements of data traffic, not voice. The basic contention operation will increase latency and jitter, two of the major factors that degrade the quality of voice service.
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