Final answer:
CSMA/CA protocol restarts from step 2 after a successful transmission to prevent the just transmitting station from dominating the channel, ensuring fairness and enhancing network efficiency and throughput by reducing collisions.
Step-by-step explanation:
In CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance), a critical network protocol used in wireless networks like Wi-Fi to manage how data packets are sent over a shared medium, there is a specific process followed to avoid collisions. When a station successfully transmits a frame and has another frame to send, it starts the process again from step 2 rather than step 1. This is because after a successful transmission, the network environment may have changed with potentially new stations wishing to transmit. Re-entering the process at step 2 forces the station to first check if the medium is idle and then wait for a random backoff time before trying to transmit again.
This design helps prevent the station that just transmitted from dominating the channel, giving other stations a fair chance to access the medium and transmit their own data. The thinking behind this is to achieve a more balanced and efficient use of the shared network resource, ensuring equitable access (fairness) and reducing the chances of consecutive collisions, thereby improving overall network efficiency and throughput.