Optimal CSMA: A survey

Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) has been widely used as a medium access control (MAC) scheme in wireless networks mainly due to its simple and totally distributed operations. Recently, it has been reported in the community that even such simple CSMA-type algorithms can achieve optimality in terms of throughput and utility, by smartly controlling its operational parameters such as backoff and holding times. In this survey paper, we summarize the recent research efforts in this area with main focus on the key intuitions and rationales, and conclude by presenting some open problems.