Distributed contention arbitration using RTS/CTS versus DATA/ACK for Wireless Sensor Networks

The data forwarding technique via contention among receiving nodes has become a prevalent cross-layer solution for multihop Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this opportunistic access/routing technique, a next-hop node is selected dynamically on a per-packet basis without knowing a priori of a relay node. As such, the mechanism is robust to frequent network topology changes, scalable to large-scale network, adaptable to dense node densities and applicable to resource-constrained networks. In this work, we evaluate the performance for the distributed contention arbitration and resolution schemes with and without using Request-To-Send/Clear-To-Send (RTS/CTS) control packets. Through simulation, it is observed that the four-way RTS-CTS-DATA-ACK packet exchange exhibits the best performance in terms of packet loss probability, energy used per data packet and number of duplications per generated packet for carrying out data forwarding task toward the sink node.