Abstract.

In a typical wireless MAC protocol, nodes try to avoid contention by backing off when they sense contention. This has two purposes: to get data through a channel which is made noisy by the presence of other users, and to adapt to the current level of congestion. ZigZag suggests that contention might instead be tackled using coding; I will argue that this permits us to use much more robust and general TCP-inspired congestion control. I call this approach Medium Access Coding and Congestion Control or MAC3.