An adaptive RTS/CTS control mechanism for IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol

We study the impact of using or disengaging the RTS/CTS dialogue in IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC protocol under the fact that carrier sensing, transmission and interference ranges are distinctively different. The resulting throughput performance features of a linear topology network configuration are demonstrated when applying constant bit rate (CBR) UDP as well as TCP type traffic flows. Based on these results, we propose a new RTS/CTS control mechanism. Under our scheme, a terminal node decides dynamically and individually whether to use a RTS/CTS dialogue for the transmission of its current data packet. We show that this new mechanism yields distinctive performance improvements.