MACAW: a media access protocol for wireless LAN

This paper proposes a different MAC protocol for wireless medium which uses a request to send-clear to send-DATA packet exchange and binary exponential back off. There were several insights in the paper that led to this protocol:
1. The relevant congestion is at the receiver, not the sender. The paper provides a simple example to show this, by using 3 nodes (ABC) which A cannot hear from sender C and C can't hear from A, the author shows that both A and C can think the channel is clear and send, but contention happens at B when he is reciving.
2. Congestion is not a homogeneous phenomenon. The author states that it is not valid to only have a single backoff parameter, but we need separate back off parameters for each strem.
3. Congestion levels should be a collective enterprise. I felt like this was sort of related again back to the end to end arguments in which functionality need to be carefully evaluated as to where it is implemented. In this case, the author argues that individual congestion detection will lead to asymmetric views of the network, thus there should be a collective effort to create a better view.
4. the protocol should propagate synchronization information about contention periods, so all devices can contend equally.

While reading this paper, one thought related to the project came into mind, which is the guaranteed service for wireless LANs. I've read several papers on real-time ethernet or real-time LAN protocols which use token based mechanisms. But how well would those work for wireless environments? And how much synchronization mechanisms need to be introduced in order to easily guarantee service through a physically unreliable channel?