The Impact of SGI and RTS/CTS in WLAN Throughput
Pawan Kumar Pant
Abstract
Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) formally known as Wi-Fi is the necessity for everyone. You can find WiFi in shops, airports, schools etc. WLAN is highly susceptible to security as data transmitted over the air via wireless signals and anyone can sniff it. WLAN generally have enhanced security for the protection of wireless data. Nowadays, people using Wi-Fi for high bandwidth traffic, such as audio and video traffic. In such cases, WLAN must provide a good amount of security and performance to the clients. It will help in user satisfaction. However, high-security mechanisms defiantly limit network performance. This paper, addressed the influence on the throughput of WLAN networks by controlling the SGI (Short Guard Interval) and enabling/disabling IEEE 802.11's RTS/CTS (Request To Send/Clear To Send) handshake under various security methods used in WLAN. In our experiments, we have simulated a Wi-Fi network and performed various measurements while changing RTS/CTS, SGI and the security methods. We have simulated the environment in NS3 simulator and found that there is a significant impact of RTS/CTS and SGI on throughput performance.