Hidden terminals are a key reason for performance degradation in wireless networks. When transmitting nodes cannot carrier sense each other, their packets can collide at receiving nodes, causing packet loss. In the IEEE 802.11 protocol, the RTS/CTS mechanism was introduced to combat the hidden terminal problem. While RTS/CTS can help improve network performance when hidden terminals exist, it can decrease the performance in the absence of hidden terminals due to the overhead of sending additional control traffic. For this reason, RTS/CTS is usually disabled in default driver settings. In this thesis, we present an algorithm for dynamically adjusting the use of RTS/CTS. The algorithm, called SmartRTS, continuously monitors traffic feedback in order to decide whether RTS/CTS should be used. The goal is to enable RTS/CTS in the face of hidden terminals and disable RTS/CTS when hidden terminals do not exist. We find SmartRTS to be effective and easily employed. With extensive simulations using both simple and random topologies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SmartRTS, especially over static RTS/CTS configurations (ie- RTS/CTS enabled or RTS/CTS disabled). SmartRTS can adapt to the appearance and disappearance of hidden terminals and substantially improve overall network throughput by as much as 11-35%. / text

Ad hoc network is a new tendency of data transmission in the future. Because of the convenience and necessity of mobile phone and/or portable computer coupled with wireless data services, TCP/IP has become an important topic for the study in wireless networks. However, there were a few difficulties in data transmission that must be overcome due to ad hoc environments and the characteristics of the IEEE 802.11 protocols. In these protocols, MAC layer is our primary research topic. Based on the RTS/CTS signal of dynamic retransmission [4], this study presented an improvement to solve the problems: (1) media resources was easily robbed due to the RTS/CTS signal competition, (2) data frame would be dropped by the IEEE 802.11 protocol due to too many times collisions. In addition, this study modifies the CWND in TCP layer in accordance with congestion conditions. Sender can transmit data packets to the network, in which resources can be completely utilized without any waste or loss. We also use the related parameters from the IP and TCP header to calculate flow numbers. The calculated parameters are recorded in IP and TCP header, and then instantly forwarded to the receiver via routers. The receiver can forward these parameters back to the sender by using back transmission method. The simulation result shows that the proposed methods can effectively improve TCP performance, such as packet loss rate, and fastly increase the CWND, the buffer utilization, and so forth. Thus, the network can perform more effectively while using the MAC-layer RTS/CTS signal.

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