The impact of RTS threshold on IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol

Wireless technologies and applications received great attention in recent years. The medium access control (MAC) protocol is the main element that determines the efficiency in sharing the limited communication bandwidth of the wireless channel in wireless local area networks (WLANs). The request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTSICTS) mechanism is an optional handshaking procedure used by the IEEE 802.11 wireless network to reduce the possibility of collision. The RTS-Threshold (RT) value which determines when the RTS/CTS handshaking mechanism should be used is an important parameter to investigate; since different RT values will produce different performance characteristics in data transmission. This paper presents an analysis of the influence of the RT parameter on the IEEE 802.11 wireless network, and gives a guideline to dynamically adjust the RT value. Simulation results of this paper show that the RTSICTS mechanism should be always turned on (RT = 0) to achieve an excellent performance while saving complex work designing a dynamic RT mechanism which will not have notable effect.