Macaws are long-tailed, often colourful New World parrots.

Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance for Wireless (MACAW) is a slotted Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol widely used in ad hoc networks. Furthermore, it is the foundation of many other MAC protocols used in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). The IEEE 802.11 RTS/CTS mechanism is adopted from this protocol. It uses RTS-CTS-DS-DATA-ACK frame sequence for transferring data, sometimes preceded by an RTS-RRTS frame sequence, in view to provide solution to the hidden terminal problem. Although protocols based on MACAW, such as S-MAC, use carrier sense in addition to the RTS/CTS mechanism, MACAW does not make use of carrier sense.