Wireless LAN MAC protocols

Sushant Jain Ratul Mahajan

sushjain@cs.washington.edu ratul@cs.washington.edu

May 10, 2000

1 Introduction

The MAC (Medium Access Control) protocols can be roughly categorized into three broad classes
[16]. The fixed assignment set will have schemes like TDMA, CDMA and FDMA. These proto-
cols lack the flexibility in allocating resources and thus have problems with configuration changes.
This makes them unsuitable for dynamic and bursty wireless packet data networks. The random
assignment class consisting of ALOHA[1] and CSMA is very flexible instead and is what is predom-
inantly used in wireless LAN protocols. The demand assignment with schemes like Token Ring,
GAMA[20] and PRMA[7] attempt to combine the nice features of both the above but special effort
is needed to implement them in the wireless case (Eg. Token Ring needs to know its neighbors).
There are systems designed using one or more of these classes. For instance cellular networks use
ALOHA to get the code when entering a cell and CDMA for subsequent communication. For the
purposes of this paper we restrict ourselves to second (more interesting) class of random assign-
ment. To have a reasonable working set at hand, we do not consider protocols proposed in the
context of wireless ATM; these deal with ATM specific issues like different traffic types.
The multiple access problem arises for broadcast media, when multiple users share a common
channel to communicate (as against point-to-point connection)[19]. The two major objectives of
any such protocol are maximization of the channel capacity utilization and minimization of latency
between a station deciding to transmit and able to transmit. There is an inherent tension in these
two desirable goals. Other goals which might be equally important in some cases could be fairness
and stability.
We briefly mention some of fundamental techniques used in the wireless LAN communication.
In Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) a station senses the medium before transmitting and
defers to any ongoing transmission. This requires a special carrier sensing circuit. Two extensions
to CSMA are collision detection (CSMA/CD) and collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). In the for-
mer the senders detect collision (and thus immediately learns of transmission failure) and stops
transmitting to reduce the overhead of a collision. In collision avoidance, the sender waits for
an Inter Frame Spacing (IFS) before contending for the channel after the channel becomes idle.
Collision avoidance can also be achieved by the second basic primitive RTS/CTS exchange. In
RTS/CTS exchange a sender transmits an RTS (ready to send) packet to the receiver before the
data transmission. The data is transmitted only after reception of a CTS (clear to send) from the
receiver, which the receiver sends on reception of a successful RTS. This technique is referred to

1
as packet sensing (PSMA), (a station takes decision based on semantics of the packet received in
full and not carrier sense).

2 Issues in Wireless Communication

While some concepts and design experience gained in the wired world can be brought into the
wireless domain, there are some problems which are unique to this medium. In this section we
brief a give description of these new faced by the protocol designers.
Usually a wireless node has one antenna, for both sending and receiving. This makes collision
detection difficult if not impossible. The problem does not go away even if the node has two
antennas. The reason being that the sending signal has much higher power and thus swamps
any signal that might be coming in. There have been methods proposed in the literature [5, 6]
to get over this problem by pausing while transmitting. Unfortunately even this approach does
not enable a node to detect all kinds of collisions (even if we don’t consider the overheads of this
scheme in the low load case). The trouble is that collisions happen at the receiver and not the
sender. Thus all the protocols we talk about in this paper don’t even attempt collision detection.
A common problem which has long been recognized in the wireless world is that of hidden terminal
[2]. This problem occurs when two senders are not in the vicinity of each other (so cannot carrier
sense each other’s signals) but both of them are in the range of the common receiver. So carrier
sensing fails in this case. The RTS/CTS exchange helps alleviate this problem to a certain extent
(see below) but does not make it go away completely. A related issue is the exposed terminal
problem, where a station can sense the medium busy because of a nearby sender and thus refrains
from sending even when its transmission would not have collided at its destined receiver. This
problem is not considered as serious as the hidden terminal problem and becomes irrelevant in
case of protocols which ack at link layer (eg. MACAW, DFWMAC) as in this case we cannot
afford a collision even at the sender because of the incoming acks.
Another problem in similar vein as those above is that of capture. This occurs when the received
power at the receiver from two senders is significantly different. The sender with higher power
“captures” the receiver, which will never be able to sense the second signal. This leads to significant
fairness problems.
The wireless medium inherently has higher error rates because of interference between co-located
LAN’s, self-interference, fading, interference caused by other electronic devices and collisions. This
needs to be taken into account in the protocol design phase. For instance, DFWMAC has link
level acknowledgements to provide a better end-to-end service.
A transceiver circuit has a turn around time, known as Rx/Tx-turnaround, to switch between
receiving and transmitting. This imposes a restriction on how fast one can receive and respond
back. Wireless protocols have to deal with this and it becomes a more serious issue when different
transceivers are being used in the same LAN. For this reason there have been protocols proposed
[17] that try to reduce the number of turnarounds.
Power has always been a scarce resource in wireless devices. MAC protocols are expected to
contribute towards efficient power utilizations. There have been very few solutions to this problem.
The standards [14, 13] have not been able to deal with this effectively..

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The ability to support QoS is a difficult undertaking. This is not because of processing limitations
like in the wired world, but because most of the protocols are contention based with no limits
on how long the contention will last. Making these protocols contention free might sound like a
solution but is not, because of low resource utilization achieved by these protocols. Also dealing
with multiple hops in a potentially dynamic network is a hard problem.
In spite of the fact the medium here inherently broadcast, the issues of multicast and broadcast
has not been addressed by any MAC protocol [10]. Multicast functionality has eluded the wireless
LAN at the MAC layer. The problem comes because of high error rates. In a large receiver set
there are chances that one of the receivers will receive the packet in error. Also for obvious reasons
acks cannot be used here for reliability (implosion effect). Because of this and other difficulties no
MAC protocol has come forward to supporting multicasting in wireless LAN’s (multiple unicast
based solutions are employed).
Security becomes a bigger issue in wireless domain because of ease of snooping. Another problem
area for wireless MAC protocols is dealing with high speed mobility.

3 Wireless LAN MAC Protocols

This section presents an overview of the existing body of research in the area of wireless LAN
MAC protocols.

3.1 ALOHA

The history of wireless communication can be traced back to ALOHA [1]. Aloha was designed
by Abramson in 1970 [1] for linking the various Hawaiian islands. It is a very simple protocol
in which a station sends data whenever it has data to send. The receipt of an acknowledgement
(which might be implicit) assures the sender that data has been delivered successfully, else it is
sent again after a random time gap. Aloha is useful in cases in which carrier sensing is not possible
or impractical (like in satellite communications). It can be easily shown using simple traffic load
assumptions that peak Aloha performance is only 18 %. While this channel utilization might
seem bad, Aloha’s biggest strengths is its simplicity which can justify its usage in cases where high
utilizations is not the primary concern. Subsequent variations like slotted ALOHA and reservation
ALOHA significantly improve the performance.

3.2 CSMA

The fundamental reason for low channel utilization of Aloha protocol is that senders don’t defer to
each other even when another transmission is in progress. CSMA rectifies this problem by carrier
sensing (explained above). In p-persistent CSMA, the station sends a packet with probability p as
soon as the carrier becomes idle. In nonpersistent CSMA a station will set a random time interval
when it senses that the channel is busy and tries to transmit again after that instead of continuously
monitoring the channel. Without a scheme like exponential backoff p-persistent CSMA can be
unstable when offered loads are high, as many stations begin transmission simultaneously when
the current transmission ends.

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3.3 BTMA

It was recognized by Kleinrock and Tobagi [2] that wireless systems suffer from, the now well
known, hidden terminal problems In the same document the authors presented BTMA, a solution
to deal with the hidden terminal problem. BTMA is an acronym for busy tone multiple access.
The available frequency is divided into data channel and a control channel. While a station is
receiving data on the former channel, it places a busy-tone on the control channel. This signals to
other potential senders that the receiver is busy and they should defer their transmissions. This
protects the system from hidden terminal problems. BTMA can also be used to get rid of the
exposed terminal problems if the sender ignores the carrier sense signal when there is no busy-
tone on the control channel. The problem with BTMA is that it requires to split the channel into
two making receivers more complex. The two bands also need to be separated by a guard band,
which wastes channel frequency. Also since the propagation characteristics of the radio link are
dependent on frequency, a station might hear just one of the two signals (busy-tone or data)[8].

3.4 SRMA

The first protocol to propose handshake between the sender and receiver was SRMA or split-
channel reservation multiple access[3]. SRMA proposes use of a separate channel for RTS/CTS
exchange (explained above). SRMA gets rid of the need for transmitting a continuous busy-tone
signal and thus might end up saving some power. While the original proposal required two separate
channels and the associated hardware complexity, there is nothing in the scheme that prevents it
from being used only in a single channel.

3.5 MACA

MACA (multiple access collision avoidance) was the first modern protocol which used RTS/CTS
exchange and underscored the benefit of it over the then existing protocols (which were largely
CSMA/CA based). The motivation was again the hidden terminal problem and the inspiration
AppleTalk[4]. In MACA before a station sends the data it sends an RTS message to the receiver. On
success the receiver responds with a CTS. The nearby stations are also listening to this exchange.
If a station hears RTS it waits for the corresponding CTS. If it does not hear CTS, it means any
transmission it has will not interfere with the receiver. The assumption here is if you cannot hear
the receiver, the receiver cannot hear you too. This helps alleviate the exposed terminal problem.
Any station, other than the original RTS sender, on hearing CTS will defer its transmission. The
time for which to defer transmission depends on the packet length to be transmitted which is
contained in the CTS packet. This takes care of the hidden terminal problem. Binary exponential
backoff was used in case of collisions of RTS packets. MACA requires much simpler hardware
because of absence of carrier sense.

3.6 MACAW

Various practical problems with MACA were identified by MACAW (MACA for Wireless)[10]
and proposed changes that solves some of them. This was one of the first wireless MAC protocol
that was designed with fairness in mind. MACAW gets rid of Ethernet like unfairness associated

4
with binary exponential backoff algorithms by proposing a copying form of backoff counter in
which nodes use the backoff counter of a successful transmission to contend fairly in the next
cycle. Also separate backoff parameters were introduced (corresponding to different streams) to
avoid this copied parameter to spread widely even to areas with no congestion. It also proposed
a multiple stream model for fairness among streams emerging from the same station. MACAW
acknowledged the importance of link layer acknowledgements and made the protocol from RTS-
CTS-Data to RTS-CTS-Data-ACK. With the introduction of this ACK packet means that exposed
terminals should not transmit now, or else they will trash the incoming ack. There are two ways
of dealing with this, carrier sense or an explicit packet specifying the length of the transmission
at the start of it. MACAW takes the latter approach to keep the hardware simple and calls this
packet DS (data sending). Another control packet RRTS (Request for RTS) was added to let
the receiver contend for the sender to improve fairness in cases when there are two receivers in
the vicinity of each other (thus only one can receive). By making the protocol significantly more
complex MACAW lost performance when the channel was lightly loaded but led to much better
throughput and fairer allocation in presence of high loads.

3.7 FAMA

A B C D

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✎✎☞☛ ✕✁ ☛ ✕✕ ☞✁ ☛ ✕✕ ☞✁ ☛ ✕✕ ☞✁ ☛ ✕✕ ✔✁✓✓☞☛ ✖✕✕ ✔✁ ✓✓ ✌ ✔✁ ✓✓ ✍✌ ✔✁ ✓✓ ✍✌ ✔✁ ✓✓ ✍✌ ✔✁ ✓✓ ✍✌ ✔✁ ✓✓ ✍✌ ✔✓✓ ✍✌
✏✞✎ ✖✁ ✖✁✟✞ ✖✁ ✖✁✖✁ ✖✁✖✁
RTS

✏✟✁✞✝✆✁✟✁✞✏✁✟✁✞✏✁✟✁✞✏✁✟✁ ✏✞✁✕✁✟✁ ✖✁✔✁ ✖ ✔✁ ✌✌✁✔✁ ✍✌✍✁ ✔✁✍✌ ✔✁ ✌ ✍ ✔✁✍✌ ✔✁ ✍✌✍✁ ✔ ✍✌

✟✁✞✝✆✟✁✝✞✆ ✟✁✞✟✁✞ ✟✁✞✟✁✞ ✟✁✞✟✁✞ ✟✁
CTS
✞✞ ✟✁ ✞✞ ✂✁ ✞✁✁ ✟ ✌ ✌ ✁
✍ ✌ ✁
✍ ✌ ✁
✍ ✌ ✍✌
✁
✟ ✁
✟ ✞ ✟ ✂✁ ✂✂ ☎✁ ✄✄ ☎✁ ✄✄ ☎✄✄
✝✆✆✝ ✁✁
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☎ ✄ ☎✁
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A packet
C packet
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COLLISION

✁✁
✂✁ ✂✁✂ ☎✁ ☎✁
Figure 1: Complex hidden terminal problem

On first thought MACA seems to solve the hidden terminal problem, but that’s not quite true. This
happens primarily because the neighbors may not be able to hear CTS/RTS messages correctly.
For example consider the topology in figure 1 in which only adjacent nodes can hear each other.
A completes a successful RTS-CTS exchange with B and starts transmitting data. C which is a
neighbor of B also started a RTS sequence just at the time B replied CTS to A, and hence is not
able to realize that B is going to be in conservation. (B’s CTS, C’s RTS collide at C). D sends a
CTS signal to C and C now thinks he has acquired the channel and starts transmitting the data
which collides at B. One solution to this problem would be to make the length of CTS packet
longer then the RTS packet, which would make sure that C hears the B’s CTS message. This
is only one instance in which the protocol fails and one can easily come up with other scenarios
where it fails.
Floor acquisition multiple access, FAMA, [11] represents a family of MAC protocols which operate
in two phases, acquire the channel(floor acquisition) followed by the actual transmission of data.

5
These protocols ensures that data packets will be collision free and multiple packets can be sent
by the sender. A key distinguishing observation is that this guarantees once channel is successfully
acquired transmission of data packets is collision free unlike in MACA (or MACAW), where even
after a successful RTS-CTS exchange, data packets can collide with other nearby transmissions
(like above). FAMA has various variants each having different timing requirements for floor
acquisition and performance characteristics. The variants are based on techniques used to acquire
the floor and scope of the problem addressed (like single hop vs ad hoc networks). For example
[15] author’s prove that sending RTS packets without sensing the medium is inherently inefficient
than using non persistent CSMA based techniques. An important and novel contribution of the
work is derivation of sufficient timing requirements that must be met for correctness based on
propagation delay, packet sizes, RTS/CTS sending timings, and Rx/Tx-turnarounds.

3.8 GAMA

GAMA-PS (Group Allocation Multiple Access with Packet Sensing) [20] is a channel access
protocol for asynchronous, packet-sensing wireless networks. The idea is to organize the channel
into cycles dynamically. Each cycle is composed of a contention period and a group-transmission
period. Every member interested in transmission contends for membership in the transmission
group. Once a station is in the group, it is able to transmit a data packet during each cycle without
collision. The membership persists as long as it has some data to send. The group is maintained in
a distributed manner. All members of the group hear to the channel to learn about other members
in the group, its own position in the group etc. Joining a group is based on RTS/CTS mechanism.
In some sense this is a mixture of TDMA and CSMA. When the network is lightly loaded it’s
behavior is much like CSMA. As the number of senders increases the cycle size increases up to a
maximum and it behaves pretty much like TDMA.

3.9 DFWMAC

Apart from all the pure “researchy” protocol design described above, there have been many im-
portant standardization efforts. For space and time constraints we mention only two of them here
(the important ones missed out are Bluetooth and HomeRF). The IEEE 802.11 standard
can be used in either an ad hoc infrastructure less setup or with a supportive base station based
environment. The sharing is achieved using either a distributed coordination function (DCF) or
a point coordination function (PCF). The DCF protocol DFWMAC[14] (Distributed Founda-
tion Wireless MAC), which uses IFS (Inter Frame Spacing) for collision avoidance. The 802.11
standard defines three types of IFS’s for three different access priorities. After SIFS (Short IFS),
only acks, CTS and data frames in response to a poll by base station may be sent. After PIFS
(PCF-IFS), any frames from the contention free period maybe sent and all other packets may be
sent after DIFS (DCF-IFS). A SIFS is the shortest while DIFS is the longest duration. A station
that intends to transmit and senses channel busy will wait for the end of transmission followed by
a time period of DIFS length. After this it randomly selects a time slot within the backoff window.
If no other station has started transmitting before the end of this slot is reached, it starts its own
transmission. If another station has seized the channel, the station freezes its backoff counter,
waits for the end of transmission and now only waits for the slots remaining from the previous
competition. This provides better delay bounds in presence of high loads and avoids starvation.
This basic access scheme can optionally be extended by use of a RTS/CTS message exchange.

6
The stations in this case compete for sending the RTS messages. The DCF service above does not
provide any sort of guarantees. In order to provide time bounded traffic the PCF mode maybe
used for contention free asynchronous transfers. In this the base station polls the stations that
are on its polling list and allows them undisturbed access. To get on the polling list (either once
or periodically), the stations contend through the DCF mode.

3.10 EY-NPMA

The ETSI Hiperlan is a standard for wireless communication in Europe. It uses EY-NPMA[13]
(elimination yield - non-preemptive multiple access) protocol. EY-NPMA supports time bounded
delivery of packets. This is achieved by dynamic assignment of access priorities which depend on
the remaining lifetime of the packet (the exact priority is a function of the user assigned priority
and lifetime of the packet). The MAC protocol for Hiperlan is a unique one, which does not
resemble anything we have talked about till now. The multiple access problem in EY-NPMA is
broken down into three phases. In the priority resolution phase the station listens to the medium
till the priority slots for the higher priorities have gone idle. If the channel was idle for some
number priority slots only the stations with the same highest priority survive. The elimination
phase every station transmits a burst with a random length, bounded and defined by a certain
discrete probability distribution. In this phase the station transmitting the longest burst wins,
which the winning station finds out because the channel will be idle when it stops transmitting.
This station will then wait for a random period in the yield phase. If it does not sense anything
on the channel at the end of this phase, it transmits its data.
Comparison between the two standards was carried out in [16]. Both protocols were found to
be stable even at offered loads of 400%. DFWMAC gives better throughput percentage (of total
achievable) than EY-NPMA. The mean access delay seen in DFWMAC is generally lower than
that in EY-NPMA. But since the EY-NPMA protocol requires a minimal number of Rx/Tx-
turnarounds it might provide better throughput in low load conditions. For a given packet size,
throughout and delay are inverse of each other in both protocols which is expected in such con-
tention based protocols. Detailed simulations were carried out in [14] to analyze the performance
of DFWMAC for fairness and throughput.

4 Future Research

In this section we discuss interesting research issues which are still open in this area. This might
not be an exhaustive list but just a brief description of what we feel the ongoing research should
address.
Increasingly it is being observed that multi-hop ad hoc networks are not easy to deal with. The
recurrence of hidden terminals was the first sign of this[15]. The simple protocols which were
designed with a base station or single-hop network in mind are lacking in many desirable features.
It is difficult to provide any sophisticated services or guarantees or fairness across multiple hops.
Specifically we need MAC protocols that preserve delivery guarantees across the network even if
loosely. Since there are contentions at every hop this becomes non-trivial job. The newer protocols
being proposed [18, 24, 7] bring back the reservation based schemes in some form or the other
to achieve this. However, because of space and time limitations an analysis of these protocols

7
has been left out. Ozugur et. al. [21] proposes a p-persistent CSMA based protocol in which
fair access is provided using link access probabilities. However this scheme like other reservation
based scheme is sensitive to network topology. How does it effect the protocol when a new station
without reservations steps in the radio range or how to use the channel efficiently when a station
with reservations departs quietly?
Detailed theoretical analyses of various protocols across various aspects like correctness, perfor-
mance, security, fairness and complexity remains open. The work done by Fuller [11, 15] scratch
the surface of these issues and provides insight into the constraints on various parameters for cor-
rectness. Performance analysis is done based on Poisson based models for network traffic which
may not be realistic. A thorough analyses could provide how the protocols can be optimized for
power awareness, QoS and security. Real world testing would require a real world implementation
which most of the current studies lack.
MAC protocols with decent power adaptation are yet to make an impact. The power saving effort
can be traced back to MACA, which proposed calibrating the transmitted power according to the
distance from the receiver. Power savings proposal in DFWMAC use the base station support and
in EY-NPMA waking up at pre-arranged intervals. PAMAS [22] advocates going into the sleep
mode when you know that you won’t be transceiving for a given time, like when a transmission is
going on in the vicinity (a node can learn this by listening to RTS/CTS exchanges). Feasibility of
the protocol is yet to be ascertained and the original proposal needs a separate control channel.
This is certainly not the last word on the subject given the importance of it in wireless devices
and thus we should see some more sophisticated technologies in this domain soon.
Connecting these wireless LAN’s to other networks out there is a problem which should be ad-
dressed at the MAC layer. Most current research is on doing this at higher layers. But some
integration problems like fragmentation should be handled at the MAC layer because of high error
rates in the media. DFWMAC has some support for this using PIFS which, we felt, is not entirely
satisfactory solution given the dynamism of the network.
Link layer Multicast remains an open issue because of problems stated in section 2. Another issue
not addressed by the current body of work is security. With the ease of snooping in wireless media
it becomes more relevant. However we are not sure at what layer this should be addressed at.

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Appendix A: Comparing MAC Protocols

We provide a limited feature comparison of the protocols we have talked about in this paper. The
legend is:

CS/PS Carrier Sense or Packet Sense

Msg The messages exchanged as part of the protocol.
Ch No of channels used
C/D whether centralized or distributed scheme
QoS whether the protocol address any QoS related issue at all like time bound service or priorities
PA whether the protocol has any sort of power adaptive feature built into it (effectiveness notwithstanding)

Protocols Year CS/PS Msg Ch C/D QoS PA

Aloha 1975 none Data-Ack 1 D No No
CSMA/CA - CS Data 1 D No No
BTMA 1975 CS Data 2 D No No
SRMA 1976 PS RTS-CTS-Data 2 D No No
MACA 1990 PS RTS-CTS-Data 1 D No No
DFWMAC-DCF 1994 CS(PS) (RTS-CTS)-Data-Ack 1 D No Yes
DFWMAC-PCF 1994 PS RTR-Data-Ack 1 C Yes Yes
EY-NPMA 1994 CS Data 1 D Yes Yes
MACAW 1994 PS (RRTS)-RTS-CTS-DS-Data-Ack 1 D No No
FAMA 1995 both RTS-CTS-Data 1 D No No
GAMA 1998 both RTS-CTS-Data 1 D Yes No
PAMAS 1998 - RTS-CTS-Data 2 D - Yes

Table 1: Comparison of various MAC protocols

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