MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL (MAC) PROTOCOL IN WIRELESS NETWORK: A REVIEW

Vigneswara Rao Gannapathy, Ahamed Fayeez Bin Tuani Ibrahim, Zahriladha Bin Zakaria, Mohamad Kadim Bin Suaidi

Abstract: The communication medium (i.e. channel) is tuned to the same frequency to enable all the nodes to communicate between each other in wireless network. Therefore, a common channel is shared by all nodes to pass or transmit their information and to establish communication with common neighboring nodes. Due to this reason, only one node (transmission) is allowed to transmit at ones and the rest of the nodes in a network need to be in an idle (i.e. silent) mode. Otherwise, if more than one node commits into transmission at the same time, then it will leads to collision and transmission failure. In order to regulate and prevent such collision and transmission failure, the regulation protocol, known as Medium Access Control (MAC) is used in wireless network. Since 1970, various MAC protocols was used and employed to regulate the communication in the network. This article presents an exhaustive review of MAC protocols, the operation of each protocol, and its advantages and disadvantages. Other than that, a typical MAC protocol used in IEEE 802.11 standard wireless networks such as Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) also explained and presented in this article.

Keywords: Medium Access Control (MAC), ALOHA, CSMA, CSMA/CA, Random Access Protocol, Contention Based Protocol

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2016.0511042