MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL (MAC) PROTOCOLS.

This article presents information on communication networks. A number of communication networks use a broadcast (or multiaccess) transmission, medium, where the signal transmitted by a node (station) is received by every other node that is in the listening area of the transmitting node. The constraints vary by technology and also by network type. The general task of the medium access control (MAC) protocol is to organize the transmissions such that under the given constraints successful communication takes place over the broadcast transmission medium. A large number of MAC protocols have been proposed in the literature, and quite a few of them are standardized and widely deployed in different commercial networks.