(a) A collection of eight nodes con- (b) A collection of eight nodes con-

nected by point-to-point wired links nected by a wired bus

Figure 1.6: Illustration of the point-to-point link and multiple access bus topologies

dependent but in general an address can be thought of as a string of bits which uniquely identify
a node. In many systems, the manufacturer assigns this address to a node.

The second and more important issue is that of sharing the channel access among the source-
destination pairs or channel allocation. A collision occurs when two nodes send information at
the same time onto the bus. The received signal at all the other nodes will be a superposition
of the transmitted signals and cannot be demodulated correctly at their respective receivers.
Distributed algorithms called medium access control (MAC) protocols are used to avoid or recover
from collisions in multiple access channels. For this reason, the addresses described in the
previous paragraph are called MAC addresses. MAC protocols require the cooperation of all the
nodes sharing the multiple access channel and run in a distributed fashion on all of them.

Some MAC protocols are based on the principle of random access which works well if the sources
send information infrequently. In this approach, a source node sends information whenever it
needs to and hopes for no collisions. When collisions occur, the source node knows that there
are other nodes competing to access the channel. All the source nodes involved in the collision
then time their retransmissions carefully in order to minimize the chances of future collisions.
An improvement over the pure random access MAC protocols is carrier sense multiple access
(CSMA). In this scheme, the source node senses the channel to check if a transmission is ongoing
and transmits only if the channel is idle. This scheme does not necessarily mean that the
transmitted signal needs to have a carrier. It is used in baseband systems as well and the
terminology is because it was developed initially for narrowband systems.

Random access MAC protocols do not perform well if the collisions are frequent, that is when
the source nodes want to send information frequently. In this case, MAC protocols based on
scheduling or reservation are used. Such MAC protocols are also called conflict-free protocols
because they ensure that a transmission is always successful by preventing interference from
other transmissions. Time division multiple access (TDMA) is a MAC protocol where the
time axis is divided into slots and each slot is allotted to a source node for transmission. In
frequency division multiple access (FDMA), the frequency bandwidth is divided into smaller
bands which are then allocated to the source nodes. The assignment of time slots or frequency
bands can be static or dynamic. There are also other reservation-based MAC protocols suitable
for wireless channels where the source and destination nodes exchange control messages before
actual information transmission. These control messages are received by all the nodes in the
transmission range who then refrain from transmitting until the source-destination pair has