Media Access Control and Collision Domains

Summary

Nodes which shared the same connections also share the same constraints for bandwidth and communication. It’s also possible that two nodes are attempting to communicate with a third node at the same time, or with each other.

Collision Domain

A collision domain is when many nodes are all connected and can attempt to communicate or overwrite each other’s packet requests. The more nodes on a network the more likely there is to be more collisions.

CSMA/CD

Collision Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) creates a back off period where each node waits for a randomly selected period of time (in microseconds) to retransmit a message in hopes of increasing bandwidth and reducing more collisions with other signals.