Revisiting Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA)

Carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) is one of the basic medium access control (MAC) protocols specified in the popular IEEE 802.11 standard. One important feature of CSMA/CA is its use of in-band control frames for dealing with hidden terminals and reducing the cost of potential collisions. However, control frames have limited effectiveness in dealing with hidden terminals. Moreover, they introduce significant overhead into the network. This paper proposes a novel approach to addressing these two disadvantages of in-band control frames and significantly improve the performance of the CSMA/CA protocol.