Equilibria of a shared medium access network with RTS/CTS handshake mechanism

We characterize the Nash equilibrium point of the request probability in a network using the Request-to-send / Clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) handshake mechanism for channel reservation, where each node tries to minimize its average power investment selfishly while meeting its average throughput demand over the shared wireless channel to a common base station. The feasible region of throughput demands is then maximized by the optimal data transmission periods and meanwhile the average power investment at the better Nash equilibrium is reduced. In addition, the performance of the optimum design is compared to that in a network without the RTS/CTS handshake mechanism.