Effectiveness of RTS/CTS handshake in IEEE 802.11a Wireless LANs

The RTS/CTS reservation scheme in IEEE 802.11a Wireless LANs (WLANs) is employed to improve performance as it shortens packet collision duration and addresses the hidden station problem. An investigation has been conducted into how effective the RTS/CTS handshake is in reducing collision duration for 54 Mbit/s by extending an existing mathematical model for the particular packet overheads and delays defined in 802.11a. The study reveals, for the first time, that the RTS/CTS scheme is not beneficial in most network scenarios for the 54 Mbit/s data rate as currently specified in the 802.11a standard and that RTS/CTS effectiveness in improving throughput and average packet delay performance is uncertain.