Within the hierarchy of the OSI model and IEEE 802 standards, the MAC sublayer provides a control abstraction of the physical layer such that the complexities of physical link control are invisible to the LLC and upper layers of the network stack.
In turn, the medium access control block is formally connected to the PHY via a media-independent interface.
Additionally, the MAC is also responsible for compensating for collisions by initiating retransmission if a jam signal is detected.
MAC addresses are typically assigned to network interface hardware at the time of manufacture.
The channel access control mechanism relies on a physical layer multiplex scheme.
Use of directional antennas and millimeter-wave communication in a wireless personal area network increases the probability of concurrent scheduling of non‐interfering transmissions in a localized area, which results in an immense increase in network throughput.
The MAC protocol in cellular networks is designed to maximize the utilization of the expensive licensed spectrum.