Making CSMA Collision-Free and Stable Using Collaborative Indexing.

CSMA with collaborative indexing (CSMA/CI) is introduced, in which nodes collaborate with one another using carrier sensing and short signaling packets to establish collision-free schedules without the need for time slotting or the definition of transmission frames as in TDMA. The throughput of CSMA/CI is compared with the throughput of TDMA with a fixed transmission schedule, ALOHA, CSMA, and CSMA/CA analytically and with simulation experiments.