Stations must schedule beacon transmission at the nominal beacon interval. However, the transmission may suffer some delays due to the channel access. Like other frames, beacons must follow the CSMA/CA algorithm. This means that if the channel is busy (e.g., another station is currently sending a frame) when the beacon needs to be sent, it must wait. This means that the actual beacon interval may differ from the nominal beacon interval. However, stations are able to compensate for this difference by inspecting the timestamp in the beacon frame when it is finally sent.