Transmission over a communication channel using carrier sense multiple access collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) may be performed by determining for each frame if the communication channel is busy after a backoff time proportional to a randomly generated number within a contention window (CW). When the channel is not busy, a frame of data may be transmitted. When the channel is busy, the device may periodically determine if the communication channel is busy after subsequent backoff times. The value of CW is adjusted for each subsequent backoff time using a fairness protocol, in which the value of CW is increased until the value of CW reaches a maximum CW value; and then the value of CW is held until a fairness number of backoff repetitions reaches a fairness threshold; then the value of CW is reduced incrementally until the value of CW reaches a minimum CW value.