Media Access Control Protocol (MAC) for Wireless Networks
Media Access Control (MAC), a protocol used to manage data transmissions in wireless and wired networks, and minimize collisions. The MAC protocol enables network devices to detect multiple nodes transmitting at the same time and apply a collision avoidance strategy to prevent corrupted frames (Römer-Klug, 2018). Every node receives a unique address from the MAC protocol, which is used to identify sender or receiver. The MAC protocol uses techniques to solve collisions when multiple nodes attempt to connect to the wireless network simultaneously (Chen, 2021). One way to prevent collisions is known as “listen before talk” which requires nodes to listen to the medium before transmitting to ensure another node is not using the channel (Römer-Klug, 2018). After the medium becomes clear, senders can connect to the channel to send their data. After the sender is done transmitting data, the protocol will assign a time period for next node (Chen, 2021). This interval is used to avoid collisions when multiple devices access the wireless medium simultaneously. References Chen, J. (2021). An analysis of the media access control protocol that is based on wireless networks. IEEE Access, 9 (14404-14420). Römer-Klug, J. P. F. (2018). IEEE802.15.4 Media Access Control Protocol. Procedia Computer Science 135, 871-874.