CSMA/CA with RTS-CTS Overhead Reduction for M2M Communication

Overview & Synopsis

—Machine to machine communication (M2M) or machine type communication (MTC) facilitates communication without any human intervention. These applications will support an enormous number of stations (STAs). To mitigate degradation of the throughput and delay performance in wireless local area networks (WLAN) that employ carrier sense multiple access collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol with request to send and clear to send (RTS/CTS) mechanism, we propose to reduce the overhead introduced by the hand shake mechanism. The medium access control (MAC) overhead caused by the RTS and CTS messages is high comparing to the total duration of successful transmission. In order to reduce the MAC overhead we propose in this work a new strategy to serve many users successively. This strategy consists on sending many RTS in parallel by different stations on different frequency sub-bands. Once the RTS messages do not collide with each other, there will be no need to resend the RTS and wait for a CTS to gain the channel access. In this paper, this proposed strategy is investigated and we demonstrate that it reaches better saturation throughput and delay especially in loaded networks. Index Terms—Carrier sense multiple access/collision avoidance (CSMA