Collision avoidance and resolution multiple access: first-success protocols

Collision avoidance and resolution multiple access (CARMA) protocols establish a three-way handshake between sender and receiver to attempt to avoid collisions, and resolve those collisions that occur. This paper describes and analyzes CARMA protocols that resolve collisions up to the first success obtained by running a tree-splitting algorithm for collision resolution. An upper bound is derived for the average costs of resolving collisions of floor requests using the tree-splitting algorithm is obtained and applied to the computation of the average channel utilization in a fully connected network with a large number of stations. Our analysis indicates that, because CARMA protocols guarantee a successful transmission for every busy period of the channel, it achieves higher throughput than other contention-based MAC protocols based on collision-avoidance handshakes