Specification of Collision-Free CSMA MAC Protocols for Wireless LANs

This paper has been submitted to the conference WINSYS 2013.Collision-free Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols based on Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) are interesting solutions in considering real-time traffic in a wireless context. The goal of this paper is to precisely make an exhaustive presentation (which we think to be understandable and pedagogical) of the main collision-free CSMA MAC protocols for single-hop Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), considering priorities associated to the frames. The priorities are represented by either the BlackBurst technique or an adaptation of the wired CAN bus protocol to the wireless context that we call CANlike. The cornerstone of this work is the concept of Ambiguity Time Window that we have defined which allows to specify the protocol parameters of the considered protocols. In our knowledge, such kind of study has never been done