Effectiveness of RTS/CTS in IEEE 802.11 wireless adhoc network in light of order dependent capture

IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is the de facto standard for wireless local area networks (LANs) and it employs two access methods, basic access and optional four way handshaking technique, known as request-to-send/clear-to-send (RTS/CTS) mechanism. RTS/CTS scheme is employed to improve network performance as it shortens packet collision duration and thereby addresses the hidden station problem. Order dependent capture (ODC) is a recently known PHY phenomenon according to which the minimum signal-to-interference (SIR) requirement of modern receivers depends on the arrival order of frames. We have implemented ODC by modifying standard mac protocol. To the best of our knowledge none of the researcher has studied the effectiveness of RTS/CTS mechanism in light of ODC. In this paper via simulation based analysis we observe that RTS/CTS scheme with ODC shows improved throughput performance in grid and random topologies up to 35% and 20% respectively over disengagement of RTS/CTS scheme. In a regular chain topology which inherently does not have any hidden terminals, a performance gain of 60% is achieved when RTS/CTS is disengaged.