CSMA/CD - Carrier Sense Multiple Access / Collision Detect.
The low level network arbitration protocol used on
Ethernet. Nodes wait for quiet on the net before starting
to transmit and listen while they are transmitting. If two
nodes transmit at once the data gets corrupted. The nodes
detect this and continue to transmit for a certain length of
time to ensure that all nodes detect the collision. The
transmitting nodes then wait for a random time before
attempting to transmit again thus minimising the chance of
another collision. The ability to detect collision during
transmission reduces the amount of bandwidth wasted on
collisions compared with simple ALOHA broadcasting. | |