Smart RTS/CTS Adaptation

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2009-12

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Abstract

Hidden terminals are a key reason for performance degradation in wireless networks. When transmitting nodes cannot carrier sense each other, their packets can collide at receiving nodes, causing packet loss. In the IEEE 802.11 protocol, the RTS/CTS mechanism was introduced to combat the hidden terminal problem. While RTS/CTS can help improve network performance when hidden terminals exist, it can decrease the performance in the absence of hidden terminals due to the overhead of sending additional control traffic. For this reason, RTS/CTS is usually disabled in default driver settings. In this thesis, we present an algorithm for dynamically adjusting the use of RTS/CTS. The algorithm, called SmartRTS, continuously monitors traffic feedback in order to decide whether RTS/CTS should be used. The goal is to enable RTS/CTS in the face of hidden terminals and disable RTS/CTS when hidden terminals do not exist. We find SmartRTS to be effective and easily employed. With extensive simulations using both simple and random topologies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SmartRTS, especially over static RTS/CTS configurations (ie- RTS/CTS enabled or RTS/CTS disabled). SmartRTS can adapt to the appearance and disappearance of hidden terminals and substantially improve overall network throughput by as much as 11-35%.

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