Performance enhancement of WLANs

IEEE 802.11 is mostly deployed standard of Wirelesss Local Are Network (WLAN) today in the world. The distributed coordination function (DCF) is the primary medium access mechanism of these types of networks. DCF describes two methods for packet transmission that is, two way handshaking and basic access mechanism or request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS). Although RTS/CTS is very efficient in terms of system performance but due to the non-reliable nature of wireless if they are lost, may effect the overall throughput of the network. So in this paper we have proposed a mechanism, in which if either RTS or CTS are lost, the overall performance of the network will not be affected. We introduced the temporary sleep time after when of RTS/CTS are received by source or destination. Mathematical results shows up to 99% improvement in the performance if either RTS or CTS is lost.