MACAW: A Media Access Protocol for Wireless LAN's (UCB)

Finding the right MAC protocol for wireless is not a solved problem. The paper is interested in finding a good protocol for the wireless LAN for Xerox at PARC. It has a multi-cell topology with each cell consisting of one base station and multiple nodes (the paper calls them "pads"). CSMA isn't suitable, and the paper illustrates this with the "hidden" and "exposed" terminal phenonmena. The root problem is that wireless signals have side-effects in interfering with other channels. With CSMA, implicit sensing is not enough to prevent collisions. 

MACA is the predecessor of MACAW. MACA adds two new control signals (RTS and CTS) to help synchronize channel access. This helps nodes to communicate their state with nearby nodes. I.e. "I am prepared to listen to someone", or "I just started a communication stream with someone", and etc. This helps other nodes to know when to backoff. MACA assumes nodes to exchange RTS and CTS to establish connectivity. But what happens if we have rapid mobile environment where new nodes continuously comes into the cell? What is the effect of having node not hearing these control signals?

Of course, MACA is a conservative algorithm. In order to achieve more throughput and add things like fairness, this is where MACAW comes in. It adds three new control signals, Data-Send (DS), ACK, and RRTS, to increase efficiency of MACA. These signals brings even greater synchronization between nodes. However, they decrease potential contention by sending more control messages. That seems to be expensive in wireless. Power consumption overhead of setting up a transmission is incredibly demanding. Also, i don't think measuring throughput alone is the right measurement. Measuring throughput over power may be a better way to go.

In addition, MACAW enchances MACA's binary exponentially backoff (BEB) in two ways. The original BEB has problem with fairness and have starvation problems. MACAW first uses mutliplicative-increase-linear-decrease (MILD) policy to adjust backoff counter. Besides a very witty name, it's similar to the idea of AIMD. Second, it allows both the receiver and the sender to adjust the backoff counter when transmission succeeds.

The paper is a nice short read and shows a lot of the corner cases in designing a wireless link protocol. It's definitely a very involved process. On the other hand, it would also be nice to combine this reading with something about practicality issues like power consumption and environment hazards and other deployment challenges.