  Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Enhanced Collision Avoidance (CSMA/ECA) is
a distributed MAC protocol that allows collision-free access to the medium in
WLAN. The only difference between CSMA/ECA and the well-known CSMA/CA is that
the former uses a deterministic backoff after successful transmissions.
Collision-free operation is reached after a transient state during which some
collisions may occur. This article shows that the duration of the transient
state can be shortened by appropriately setting the contention parameters.
Standard absorbing Markov Chain theory can be used to describe the behaviour of
the system in the transient state and to predict the expected number of slots
to reach the collision-free operation.
  The article also introduces CSMA/E2CA, in which a deterministic backoff is
used two consecutive times after a successful transmission. CSMA/E2CA converges
quicker to collision-free operation and delivers higher performance than
CSMA/CA in harsh wireless scenarios with high frame error rates.
  To achieve collision-free operations when the number of contenders is large,
it may be necessary to dynamically adjust the contention parameter. The last
part of the article suggests an approach for such parameter adjustment which is
validated by simulation results.
