Carrier sense technology is used on wireless networks to reduce collisions because they use shared transmission channels. In any RF (radio frequency) region that contains multiple wireless devices, only one device can transmit data at a time, and it’s important to divide the available stream of transmission equally among all participants. Otherwise, the data of two different devices will collide during the same transmission, resulting in lost or corrupted information.
In a network with CSMA, each computer first senses or listens to the carrier signal to see if it’s idle before sending any data. Then it waits a random amount of time to ensure that the carrier is clear before starting transmission. This approach avoids transmission collisions and increases network efficiency.
Despite its effectiveness, this type of collision detection does have some drawbacks. It can introduce latency into the network, because stations must wait for a random amount of time before trying to send their data again. In addition, it requires the devices to exchange control messages with each other, which can increase network overhead and slow down the network.
Moreover, since the station does not know whether the other station detected its transmission and stopped it or not, there is still a possibility of a transmission collision even after a short wait. To reduce this probability, CSMA uses a back-off algorithm that prevents the second station from transmitting until it gets the signal back from the first one.
