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CSMA/CA – Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance

Vangie Beal
Last Updated May 24, 2021 7:39 am

Short for Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Avoidance, a network contention protocol that listens to a network in order to avoid collisions, unlike CSMA/CD that deals with network transmissions once collisions have been detected. CSMA/CA contributes to network traffic because, before any real data is transmitted, it has to broadcast a signal onto the network in order to listen for collision scenarios and to tell other devices not to broadcast.