This paper proposes an enhancement for the carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) protocol, called CSMA with reservations by interruptions (CSMA/RI). This new protocol uses a novel approach to reserve capacity by interrupting an ongoing packet transmission. The performance of the protocol is studied by simulations under realistic (long range dependent) traffic conditions and compared to the CSMA/CD, token ring protocols, as well as with the work conserving G/D/1 queue. It is demonstrated that CSMA/RI always offers better performance than CSMA/CD, and under certain realistic assumptions regarding packet size, the performance of CSMA/RI can be very close to that of token-ring and G/D/1.