Designing adaptive RTS for MadWifi-based WLAN device

Hidden terminal problem in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is known to degrade the performance of WLAN. Though Request-To-Send (RTS) and Clear-To-Send (CTS) can moderate the hidden terminal problem, the use of RTS/CTS without care also deteriorates the performance due to its overhead. Therefore, adaptive RTS algorithms have been studied recently, while most of those can not be implemented in MadWifi-based WLAN device due to the limitation of MadWifi. In this paper, we propose implementable RTS (iRTS) algorithm that adaptively uses the RTS for MadWifi-based WLAN device. Through MadWifi experiments in a communication environment with hidden terminals, we demonstrate that the proposed iRTS outperforms other RTS algorithms.