An Analysis of RTS/CTS Mechanism for Data Transfer In Wireless Network: A Review

In a wireless network, there is a large number of mobile nodes that share the communication medium. The wireless network employs carrier sense based MAC algorithms such as Carrier Sensing Multiple Access (CSMA) and CSMA with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) for efficient sharing of communication channel. But this method does not solve the problem of hidden nodes. Hidden nodes are those nodes that are out of range of other nodes or a group of nodes. The network throughput reduces because of packet collisions caused by these hidden nodes. To solve hidden node problem, the Request-To-Send (RTS) and Clear-To-Send (CTS) mechanism is widely used in wireless networks for reserving the channel to transmit data from source to destination. This paper is aimed to provide a survey on methodology and various algorithms and methods of implementing RTS/CTS mechanism in wireless networks.