Asymmetric RTS/CTS for exposed node reduction in IEEE 802.11 ad hoc networks

One interesting problem regarding wireless local area network (WLAN) ad-hoc networks is the effective mitigation of hidden nodes. The WLAN standard IEEE 802.11 provides request to send/clear to send (RTS/CTS) as mitigation for the hidden node problem; however, this causes the exposed node problem. The first 802.11 standard provided only two transmission rates, 1 and 2 Mbps, and control frames, such as RTS/CTS assumed to be sent at 1 Mbps. The 802.11 standard has been enhanced several times since then and now it supports multi-rate transmission up to 65 Mbps in the currently popular 802.11n (20 MHz channel, single stream with long guard interval). As a result, the difference in transmission rates and coverages between the data frame and control frame can be very large. However adjusting the RTS/CTS transmission rate to optimize network throughput has not been well investigated. In this paper, we propose a method to decrease the number of exposed nodes by increasing the RTS transmission rate to decrease RTS coverage. Our proposed method, Asymmetric Range by Multi-Rate Control (ARMRC), can decrease or even completely eliminate exposed nodes and improve the entire network throughput. Experimental results by simulation show that the network throughput in the proposed method is higher by 20% to 50% under certain conditions, and the proposed method is found to be effective in equalizing dispersion of throughput among nodes.