Survey on techniques to resolve problems associated with RTS/CTS mechanism
Rahul Mishra, Shivam Nayak, Kapil Verma, Dayashankar Singh · 2011
The Request-to-Send and Clear-to-Send (RTS/CTS) mechanism was introduced to minimize the collisions due to "Hidden Nodes" in wireless networks. It tried well to solve this problem over Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA), but it gave rise to some more problems. These problems are "Exposed Node Problem", "False Blocking Problem" and "Masked Node Problem". Exposed node is a node which is in transmission range of sender but it is not the actual receiver. False blocking arises when any RTS is sent to a blocked node. Masked node problem is the case in which RTS/CTS to solve Hidden Node problem. These problems decreased the performance of RTS/CTS badly. Till now several modifications in RTS/CTS mechanism have been proposed but none of them solved all these problems completely and hence RTS/CTS mechanism remained as an option in IEEE802.11 Distributed Coordination Function. So in this survey paper we are going to discuss briefly the drawbacks of RTS/CTS mechanism and some effective modifications in RTS/CTS mechanism which have been proposed to overcome the drawbacks of this mechanism.