A nice treatment of a classic subject--the performance of a medium access control protocol for wireless local area networks (LANs)--is offered in this paper. When the “traditional” Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 medium access control (MAC) standard works successfully to prevent collisions, the throughput can degrade significantly. Thus, many researchers have focused on analyzing the performance of carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). This paper proposes a novel algorithm, fast collision resolution (FCR), to improve the performance of transmission control protocol (TCP) or user datagram protocol (UDP).

The major contribution of this paper is in its study of the process of collision avoidance. At the beginning, the analytical representation of the throughput is presented, and the factor affecting the throughput is pointed out. Then, the intuition of the FCR is described. The performance evaluation, using simulation experiments running under the GloMoSim simulating environment, completes the study.

Despite its nice structure, and the valuable study of the wireless contention-based MAC protocol, there are several cosmetic flaws in this paper. First, many references are not cited in the text. For example, references 2, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 25, and 26 are not cited. Second, the meaning of the “average transmission time,” represented by the symbol in equation 2, is not clearly explained. On page 522, it is explained to be “the average packet length,” which is later explained on page 524 as the average transmission time for a packet.

All in all, this paper can be used as a good reference for teaching or learning the MAC standard for wireless networking.