On the stability of flow-aware CSMA

TL;DR

This paper proves that a flow-aware CSMA protocol in wireless networks ensures network stability for all traffic within the capacity region, outperforming standard CSMA.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes a flow-aware CSMA scheme, demonstrating its optimal stability properties in wireless networks.

Findings

Flow-aware CSMA guarantees stability for all traffic within capacity region.

The scheme outperforms standard CSMA in stability.

The protocol is simple and distributed.

Abstract

We consider a wireless network where each flow (instead of each link) runs its own CSMA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access) algorithm. Specifically, each flow attempts to access the radio channel after some random time and transmits a packet if the channel is sensed idle. We prove that, unlike the standard CSMA algorithm, this simple distributed access scheme is optimal in the sense that the network is stable for all traffic intensities in the capacity region of the network.