Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA)
Carrier Sense Multiple Access Protocols
With slotted ALOHA the best channel utilization that can be achieved is 1/e. This is hardly surprising, since with stations transmitting at will, without paying attention to what the other stations are doing, there are bound to be many collisions. In local area networks, however, it is possible for stations to detect what other stations are doing, and adapt their behavior accordingly. These networks can achieve a much better utilization than 1/e. In this section we will discuss some protocols for improving performance. Protocols in which stations listen for a carrier (i.e., a transmission) and act accordingly are called carrier sense protocols. A number of them have been proposed. Kleinrock and Tobagi (1975) have analysed several such protocols in detail. Below we will mention several versions of the carrier sense protocols.
1-persistent CSMA
The first carrier sense protocol that we will study here is called 1-persistent CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access). When a station has data to send, it first listens to the channel to see if anyone else is transmitting at that moment. If the channel is busy, the station waits until it becomes idle. When the station detects an idle channel, it transmits a frame. If a collision occurs, the station waits a random amount of time and starts all over again. The protocol is called 1-persistent because the station transmits with a probability of 1 when it finds the channel idle.
The propagation delay has an important effect on the performance of the protocol. There is a small chance that just after a station begins sending, another station will become ready to send and sense the channel. If the first station's signal has not yet reached the second one, the latter will sense an idle channel and will also begin sending, resulting in a collision. The longer the propagation delay, the more important this effect becomes, and the worse the performance of the protocol. Even if the propagation delay is zero, there will still be collisions. If two stations become ready in the middle of a third station's transmission, both will wait politely until the transmission ends and then both will begin transmitting exactly simultaneously, resulting in a collision. If they were not so impatient, there would be fewer collisions. Even so, this protocol is far better than pure ALOHA because both stations have the decency to desist from interfering with the third station's frame. Intuitively, this approach will lead to a higher performance than pure ALOHA. Exactly the same holds for slotted ALOHA.
Non-persistent CSMA
A second carrier sense protocol is nonpersistent CSMA. In this protocol, a conscious attempt is made to be less greedy than in the previous one. Before sending, a station senses the channel. If no one else is sending, the station begins doing so itself. However, if the channel is already in use, the station does not continually sense it for the purpose of seizing it immediately upon detecting the end of the previous transmission. Instead, it waits a random period of time and then repeats the algorithm. Consequently, this algorithm leads to better channel utilization but longer delays than 1-persistent CSMA.
P-persistent CSMA
The last protocol is p-persistent CSMA. It applies to slotted channels and works as follows. When a station becomes ready to send, it senses the channel. If it is idle, it transmits with a probability p. With a probability q = 1 - p, it defers until the next slot. If that slot is also idle, It either transmits or defers again, with probabilities p and q. This process is repeated until either the frame has been transmitted or another station has begun transmitting. In the latter case, the unlucky station acts as if there had been a collision (i.e., it waits a random time and starts again). If the station initially senses the channel busy, it waits until the next slot and applies the above algorithm. Figure 4 shows the computed throughput versus offered traffic for all three protocols, as well as for pure and slotted ALOHA.