Solving capture in switched two-node Ethernets by changing only one node

It is well known that the Ethernet medium access control protocol can cause signi cant short-term unfairness through a mechanism known as the Capture E ect, and that this unfairness condition is worst in heavily loaded Ethernets with a small number of active nodes. Recently, Ramakrishnan and Yang proposed Capture Avoidance Binary Exponential Backo (CABEB) to provide 1-packet-per-turn round robin service in the important special case of a 2-node collision domain. In this paper, we introduce an equal time round-robin scheme, in which only one node needs to be modi ed. In our scheme, the modi ed node maintains a local copy of the attempts counter of the other node. It uses this information to trigger switching its medium access policy between the two extremes of aggressively persistent and completely passive. As a result, the modi ed node can control the actions of the other node in such a way that both enjoy fair, low delay, round-robin access to the shared channel.