Analyzing the RTS / CTS Mechanism in the DFWMAC Media Access Protocol for Wireless LANs

The distributed coordination function that is used as the access scheme for asynchronous traffic within the upcoming standard for wireless LANs IEEE 802.11 optionally applies the RTS/CTS message exchange to solve the ‘hidden terminal’ scenario. In this paper, following a general discussion of the mechanism and its problems, we show the effectiveness or lack thereof of this mechanism in various cases like hidden terminals and fully meshed, optional (distributed) use of RTS/CTS and the dependencies from various parameters like physical preambles and packet sizes. We conclude this paper with a discussion of the results drawn from the simulations and an outline of problems that have yet to be investigated.