Suvit NakpeerayuthPisit VanichchanuntWarakorn SrichavengsupMuhammad Saadi2013-03-202013-03-202011https://escholar.umt.edu.pk/handle/123456789/729In wireless communication systems, an efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol is usually required so that multiple wireless stations can efficiently share the scarcely-limited wireless channel. In a typical wireless environment, wireless stations are usually geographically distributed over a service area and are not synchronized. As a consequence, wireless stations are typically required to contend for transmission opportunities. In general, if the MAC protocol is not properly designed, channel contention may cause serious transmission collisions and can considerably degrade the system throughput performance. Over the past several decades, numerous MAC protocols have been developed to smartly utilize the wireless channel, e.g., ALOHA (Abramson, 1970), carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) (Kleinrock & Tobagi, 1975; Tobagi & Hunt, 1980), and many other variants (Tasaka & Ishibashi, 1984; Karn, 1990; Frigon, et al., 2001; Amitay & Greenstein, 1994). These conventional MAC protocols have been successfully deployed in practice for different applications and environments, including the widely adopted IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless local area network systems, the emerging IEEE 802.16 (WiMAX) wireless metropolitan area network, the IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee) wireless sensor networks, and various famous MAC protocols for satellite communication networks. In addition, the emerging multimedia technologies in recent years have continuously driven the requirements for higher and higher system transmission throughput. In such an environment, the round trip propagation delays between the base station and wireless stations have increasingly become relatively larger and larger compared with a packet transmission time. As a consequence, a fair deal of recent research work has been directed toward the renewed studies of efficient MAC schemes for systems with relatively large propagation delays. This chapter overviews the existing MAC technologies and summarizes recent research advancements toward the improvements and analysis of various MAC protocols. In particular, a class of efficient modified random channel contention and reservation schemes based on our proposed work (Sivamok, et al, 2001; Srichavengsup, et al, 2005) is presented with a complete discussion of mathematical performance evaluation and numerical results.enBroadbandWireless CommunicationsMedium AccessControl ProtocolsArticle