Fairness and Convergence of CSMA with Enhanced Collision Avoidance (ECA)

This paper presents CSMA/ECA, which combines the efficiency of reservation-based protocols and the simplicity of random access mechanisms. The maximum efficiency of CSMA/CA with optimal parameter adjustment is easily exceeded by CSMA/ECA, even when fixed parameters are used by the latter. CSMA/ECA stations fairly coexist with legacy CSMA/CA and increase the portion of time that is devoted to successful transmissions while decreasing the number of collisions and empty slots. The proposed mechanism initially behaves as a CSMA/CA network, but it progressively converges to a collision-free deterministic operation. The convergence process can be modelled as a Markov Chain to assess the duration of the transitory phase.