Performance Analysis of a RTS/CTS-Based Channel Accessing Mechanism for MU-MIMO WLANs

AbstractThis paper focuses on the uplink channel accessing problem of multiple user multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) wireless local access networks (WLANs). The existing channel accessing mechanisms of MU-MIMO WLANs have poor performance in busy network environment due to heavy collisions, thus a novel channel accessing mechanism that based on request to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) frames is proposed in this paper. Moreover, saturation throughput and average delay of MU-MIMO WLANs are also obtained through analytic model. Simulation results validate the accuracy of the proposed analytic model. And comparisons between the proposed RTS/CTS channel accessing mechanism and an existing channel accessing mechanism prove that the proposed mechanism performs much better especially in heavy network environment.