Hawaii's Tech Community
ALOHAnet
The first "wireless" network... and progenitor of Ethernet... all thanks to a surfing jones
ALOHAnet, also known as ALOHA, was a pioneering computer networking system developed at the University of Hawaii. It was first deployed in 1970, and while the network itself is no longer used, one of the core concepts in the network is the basis for the widely used Ethernet.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Daniel Leuck on -
Funny - Kevin Hughes was just telling me about ALOHAnet and Pure Aloha vs. Slotted Aloha yesterday. His story was the reason I created this category.
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Permalink Reply by Kevin Hughes on -
Right, Wikipedia mentions both versions of the protocol, and that some variant is still in use as a part of cell phone networks today. I wonder what the statistics are behind that - it would be very cool to say that a certain percentage of the world population communicates with "pure aloha"!
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Permalink Reply by Sam Chepkevich on -
Sorry for the long winded post. CSMA/CA is essentially the MAC (Medium Access Control) that ALOHAnet used. Slotted Aloha added slot times to minimize collisions. CSMA/CA is used in the IEEE 802.11 MAC. CSMA/CA or just CSMA requires two medium accesses for each transmission, one for the message and one for the acknowledgement. Although CA is for Collision Avoidance, collisions can occur as they do in CSMA/CD Ethernet.
CSMA/CD or Ethernet can detect a collision, but wireless cannot, thus, the CSMA/CA method waits for an acknowledgment from the other end to determine if the packet was transmitted properly. The two medium accesses result in less throughput, by roughly half.
So basically all of the 802.11a/b/g protocols use CSMA/CA of some form in addition to OFDM (Orthagonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) which works similiar to an inverse multiplexer to accomplish transmission.
http://www.rfcafe.com/references/electrical/wireless_comm_specs.htm shows the various technologies used in wireless and cellular communications.
© 2009 Created by Daniel Leuck
