As a wide variety of mobile computing devices have emerged, a new generation of wireless LAN technology is needed to provide
adequate network connectivity for these devices.
This paper designs a new media access protocol for wireless LAN: MACAW. It is developed upon the original protocol MACA by
analyzing various performance and design issues. Compared with MACA, MACAW has significantly improved the performance,
which includes both the utilization of bandwidth and fair allocation of that bandwidth.
In my summary, the paper has four key main ideas:
1. The relevant congestion of wireless LAN is at the receiver, not the sender.
2. Congestion varies according to the location of the intended receiver.
3. Learning about congestion levels should be a collective enterprise.
4.The media access protocol should propagate synchronization information about contention periods, so that all devices can
contend effectively.
I give the paper a rating of 3 (modest contribution), because it has provided more thorough ananlysis of performance and design
issues about wireless LAN.
The paper presents the simulation results for several different network configurations to compare MACAW with MACA. Those
data provides powerful support for the superiority of the new media access protocol.
As mentioned in the paper, there are some alternative ACK'ing schemes and carrier sense mechanisms. The author left those open
for future work.