ABSTRACT
Wireless networks have undergone a spectacular boost in popularity, evidenced by tremendous research and commercialization efforts. This chapter discusses the basic medium access control (MAC) protocol's design ideas that pursue high system throughput and low average delay in the single-hop environment, targeted at the concurrent data transmission problem. It extends the single-hop environment to multihop to discuss the protocols that deal with hidden terminal and exposed terminal problems. Energy-efficient MAC protocols can be categorized into two types: power saving and transmission power control. The chapter provides a brief overview of MAC protocols that were claimed to be collision-free for wireless networks. They could be further categorized into four groups: code division multiple access, frequency hopping spreading spectrum, time division multiple access, and competition-driven MAC. It provides a review of MAC protocols categorized by their goal and functionality, namely, collision avoidance, energy efficiency, quality of service (QoS), fairness, and collision freedom, respectively.
