The medium access control sublayer

The authors begin by giving a brief overview of the physical layer, the data link layer, the network layer, the transport layer and the application layer, before going on to discuss the MAC sublayer (a subset of the data link layer) in more detail. Static allocation protocols are considered as are FDM, TDM, dynamic allocation protocols, ALOHA, CSMA, reservation protocols, wireless network protocols and MACA (multiple access with collision avoidance). The paper concludes by mentioning the IEEE 802.3 and IEEE 802.4 standards as examples.