Project of CPRE543

A Survey on the Hidden Station Problem in Wireless

Networks
By
Chang Liu
Student ID:

A SURVEY ON THE HIDDEN STATION PROBLEM IN WIRELESS

NETWORKS ..................................................................................................................... 1
1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 2
2. SOLUTIONS .................................................................................................................. 3
(a). Busy-tone multiple access (BTMA) [1] ................................................................ 3
(b). Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (MACA) [3] ...................................... 3
(c). MACAW [4].......................................................................................................... 5
(d). Floor Acquisition Multiple Access (FAMA) [2][5].............................................. 5
3. LIMITATIONS AND IMPROVEMENTS .............................................................................. 7
(a). Masked Node Problem [6] ................................................................................... 7
(b). MACA-P [7] ......................................................................................................... 8
(c). Other Considerations ........................................................................................... 9
4. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS.......................................................................................... 10
5. CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................ 11
6. FUTURE WORK .......................................................................................................... 12
(a). Control frame collision problem ........................................................................ 12
(b). Hidden-station-aware protocols ........................................................................ 13
(c). Game theory approach ....................................................................................... 13
REFERENCE .................................................................................................................... 14

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1. Introduction

Multiple access is a common choice of the medium access control protocols in

wireless networks. The general idea of a multiple access MAC protocol is that a station

senses the medium before a transmission. Only if the medium is idle, does the station

sends data. But since the interference at the receiver is what we are trying to avoid, the

hidden station problem arises. As shown in Fig. 1, Suppose the transmission of A to B is

going on when C has a frame to send to B, since C is outside the transmission range of A

(hidden from A), C senses the medium as idle, then starts the transmission, which will

corrupt the data from A received at B. Such kind of collision caused by stations hidden

from each other are called hidden station problem, also known as hidden terminal

problem, hidden node problem, etc. This problem is originally defined in [1]. Since then,

a lot of research work has been done extensively on this issue.

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A ’ i ss

ns C’s
ns ang

ng si
s ion

ra mis
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r

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A B C

Fig. 1 Hidden Station Problem

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2. Solutions

(a). Busy-tone multiple access (BTMA) [1]

BTMA assumes that all stations are within the range of transmission of the base

station or access point. And the idea of BTMA is to divide the bandwidth of a channel

into data channel and busy-tone channel. If the base station of access point senses a busy

data channel, it will transmit a busy-tone signal on the busy-tone channel. Each station

listens to the busy-tone channel to find out whether the data channel is free before a

transmission. The constraints of this approach include “the use of a separate channel to

convey the state of the data channel, the need for the base station to transmit the busy

tone while detecting carrier in the data channel, and the difficulty of detecting the busy-

tone signal in a narrowband channel” [2].

(b). Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (MACA) [3]

In [3], the “exposed station” problem that is closely related to the hidden station

problem is discussed. As shown in Fig. 2, the transmission from C to D has been going

on when B wants to send data to A. Since B senses that the medium is busy, it will defer

this transmission. But in fact, the transmission from B to A will not affect the

transmission from C to D. Under such a situation, potential concurrent transmission (B

ÆA) is prohibited because B is exposed to the ongoing CÆD transmission. Although the

exposed station problem does not cause collision, it degrades the network throughput.

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 X
A B C D

Fig. 2 Exposed Station Problem

MACA is a 3-way handshake (RTS/CTS/DATA) protocol and “was inspired by the

CSMA/CA method (used by the Apple Localtalk network for somewhat different

reasons)”[3]. It can be described as follows. Still use Fig. 1 as an example. Before A

sends out the data frame to B, it transmits a Request-To-Send (RTS) to B. Upon correctly

receiving the RTS, B replies a Clear-To-Send (CTS) frame. After A receives the CTS, it

starts the data frame transmission. During this procedure, stations that overhear the RTS

frame will defer all transmissions long enough for A to receive the CTS. While stations

(including C) that hear the CTS will keep quiet (because they are in B’s range, so their

transmission will corrupt the frames sent from A to B).

Using such a protocol, the hidden station problem is resolved with the help of

RTS/CTS handshake, i.e., C will not interrupt the transmission from A to B even though

it cannot sense the ongoing transmission. Meanwhile, the exposed station problem is also

addressed to some extent. Consider the scenario described at the beginning of this section.

Assume that the CÆD transmission used RTS/CTS/DATA handshake, B must have

heard C’s RTS, but B could not hear D’s CTS. According to MACA, B only has to wait

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long enough for C to finish receiving the CTS from D. After that, B can go ahead to

initiate the transmission to A instead of wait until CÆD data transmission completes.

(c). MACAW [4]

MACAW is a protocol based on MACA after the study of a single channel wireless

LAN at Xerox Corporation’s Palo Alto Research Center [4]. In [4], implementation

details such as the backoff algorithm and the frame queues are analyzed and revised

accordingly. Moreover, the needs to improve higher layer (TCP/UDP) throughput leads

to the introduction of ACK for each DATA frame, which brings necessary modifications

on MACA.

Use Fig. 2 as an example. Suppose we use MACA with ACK, i.e.,

RTS/CTS/DATA/ACK handshake. B cannot transmit data to A because of the potential

collision on C with D’s ACK. On the other hand, since B did not hear D’s CTS, there is

no way for B to know when the DATA/ACK handshake between C and D finish. To

solve this problem, MACAW uses RTS/CTS/DS/DATA/ACK in which “DS” (Data-

Sending) control frame is added. It works as follows. After the sender receives the CTS

and before it starts the DATA transmission, it sends out a DS frame to let all stations in

its range to know that the RTS/CTS handshake has succeeded and the DATA/ACK

handshake is about to occur. The stations that overhear the DS frame will defer all

transmissions until the ACK frame time slot has passed [4].

(d). Floor Acquisition Multiple Access (FAMA) [2][5]

MACA, MACAW, as well as their variants share the following feature, which is

“stations do not sense the channel before transmissions” [5]. “A station defers its

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transmission only after it has received and understood a complete RTS or CTS” [5].

FAMA protocols generalize the RTS/CTS-based methods into two categories:

• RTS/CTS exchange with no carrier sensing, such as MACA and its variants, FAMA-

NPS (Non-persistent Packet Sensing) [2]).

• RTS/CTS exchange with non-persistent carrier sensing, such as FAMA-NTR (Non-

persistent Transmit Request) [5] or FAMA-NCS (Non-persistent Carrier Sensing) [2]).

Fig. 3 At t1, S sends RTS to R. At t2 > t1, R replies a CTS. At the mean time,

H sends an RTS to R. At t3 > t2, DATA sent from S collides with the RTS

from H at R [5].

Fig. 3 shows the scenario when collision happens using MACA. FAMA solve this

problem by making CTS last long enough or be repeated enough times to avoid such kind

of collisions. It is proved in [2] that for FAMA-NCS, correct floor acquisition can be

achieved as long as γ > τ and γ + 2τ + ε < γ ′ < ∞ with the presence of hidden stations.

Here γ / γ ′ is the transmission time of RTS/CTS, τ is the maximum propagation delay,

and ε is the hardware transit-to-receive transition time. Meanwhile, for FAMA-NPS (no

carrier sensing), with the presence of hidden stations, correct floor acquisition can be

achieved if the receive repeats at least 2N+1 CTS in response to an RTS and the

minimum waiting time required after an unsuccessful RTS is greater than 2 N (γ + 2τ )

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where N is the total number of neighbors any node in the network may have, plus the

maximum number of neighbors any one of those neighbors may have, and γ is the

transmission time of RTS or CTS. It can be seen that such a restrictive requirement

confirms the necessity of carrier sensing in RTS/CTS-based hidden station solutions.

3. Limitations and Improvements

Although protocols discussed in section 2 have provided various solutions to the

hidden station problem. They still have limitations. And there is still space to improve the

performance.

(a). Masked Node Problem [6]

As shown in Fig. 4, the CTS from B to A collided with D’s data frame at node C so

that C cannot understand the CTS and find out the updated NAV value. Later, after the

DÆE data transmission finish, C thinks (and senses) that the channel is free to use. It

initiates a transmission to B by an RTS, which collides with the data frame sent from A at

node B. The reason behind this situation is that node C is “masked” by ongoing DÆE

transmission so that it cannot correctly hear any CTS sent by other stations. [6] evaluates

the impact of this problem on IEEE 802.11 ad hoc network by mathematical analysis and

experiments and concludes that the masked node problem significantly affect the delay

and throughput performance [6]. Unfortunately, up to this point, there is no positive result

on dealing with this problem yet.

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 Fig. 4 Masked Node Problem [6]

(b). MACA-P [7]

When RTS/CTS/DATA/ACK handshake is used, valid concurrent transmission could

be inhibited. As shown in Fig. 5, in (1), the transmissions AÆB and PÆQ can run in

parallel without harm. But using RTS/CTS/DATA/ACK handshake, one of transmissions

must wait for the other to fully complete. Similar limitation also exists for (2). The

obstacle of this problem is a node’s change of roles (senderÅÆreceiver) during the 4-

way handshake [7]. Look at Fig. 5 (1), suppose concurrent data transmissions AÆB and

PÆQ are going on simultaneously. Assume AÆB data transmission finishes before

PÆQ data transmission. Since B has to send an ACK back to A (A & B switch their

sender/receiver roles), this ACK will collide with the data transmission from P at node Q.

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 Fig. 5 Using RTS/CTS, these traffic patterns are prohibited. But (1) and (2)

should be allowed to encourage concurrency [7].

The idea of MACA-P is to put extra information in RTS/CTS frame to explicitly

delineate the intervals for both the DATA and ACK transmissions, instead of only to

specify the total (DATA+ACK) transmission duration. Fig. 6 illustrates this scheme. B

has overheard Q’s CTS when it receives A’s RTS. If A allows its transmission schedule

to be modified, B will send back a CTS with modified TDATA and TACK that synchronize

with PÆQ transmission to facilitate concurrency.

Fig. 6 MACA-P [7]

(c). Other Considerations

In the real world, a lot of factors may affect the effectiveness of RTS/CTS scheme. In

[8], the impacts of the difference between the transmission range and carrier sensing

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range is discussed. The motivation is that the assumption that hidden nodes are within

transmission range of receivers cannot always hold due to the fact that power needed for

interrupting a frame reception is much lower than that of delivering a frame successfully

[8]. In [9], node mobility is considered. And [10] takes different transmission rates for

control frames and data frames into consideration. Interested readers can refer to these

papers for details.

4. Performance Analysis

RTS/CTS handshake can reduce the chance of collisions resulted from the hidden

stations with the price of control frames overhead. An interesting issue is the impact of

RTS/CTS on the throughput performance. It is shown in [11] that only when the number

of stations is very few (2 or 3), does RTS/CTS mechanism perform a little worse. When

the number of stations is greater than or equal to 5, RTS/CTS always has better

throughputs. Moreover, the performance sensitivity on system parameters (such as

transmission probability) is less when RTS/CTS is used. Hence, RTS/CTS method should

be used in the majority of the practical cases [11].

In IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, the dot11RTSThreshold is used to control when to

trigger RTS/CTS. Namely, when the data frame size is smaller than the threshold, do not

use RTS/CTS; otherwise use it. The impact of RTS threshold on the throughput

performance by simulation is analyzed in [12], which concludes that the number of

contending stations is the main factor that influences the optimal threshold value while

the frames arrival rate and the length of frames are ignorable. Since the best throughput

performance is obtained with the RTS threshold set to a small value, [12] suggest always

using RTS/CTS mechanism.

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5. Conclusions

In this survey, I make a brief summary on the hidden station problem. Various

solutions are discussed. BTMA [1] uses a separate busy-tone channel to make all in range

stations aware of ongoing transmission. MACA [3] eliminates the need for a separate

busy-tone channel and provides the RTS/CTS/DATA handshake solution. From then on,

the RTS/CTS mechanism became the basic building block for the major solutions for the

hidden station problem. The idea is to have the sender initiate an RTS frame to the

receiver, and the receiver replies a CTS frame to the sender so that all stations within the

transmission range of the receiver defer their transmission until the data transmission

completes. Because of the need for ACK for DATA, major revision is made in MACAW

[4] based on MACA. In MACAW, the frame exchange sequence becomes

RTS/CTS/DS/DATA/ACK in which DS is sent by the sender before the DATA frame so

that stations in sender’s transmission range defer their transmissions until the sender

successfully receives the ACK from the receiver. Noticing the problem caused by the

absence of carrier sensing in MACA as well as its variants, FAMA [5][2] introduced a

new protocol (FAMA-NTR [5], FAMA-NCS [2]) in which a station senses the medium

before transmitting RTS. And RTS/CTS-based no carrier sensing protocols like MACA

and its variants becomes FAMA-NPS [2]. In addition, FAMA take the propagation delay

into account and gives RTS/CTS length restriction to guarantee the correct floor

acquisition.

Even after these efforts, there are situations when collision caused by hidden stations

may still happen. The masked node problem [6] is an example. This problem happens

when a station is masked by ongoing transmission so that it cannot understand a CTS so

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that this station may start a transmission later to corrupt the transmission specified by that

CTS. On the other hand, there is room to improve the throughput performance by

introducing more potential concurrent transmissions. MACA-P [7] proposes a new

protocol that encourages more parallel transmission by putting extra information in

RTS/CTS frames. Furthermore, physical factors such as the difference between the

transmission range and carrier sensing range [8], node mobility [9], and different

transmission rates for control frames and data frames [10] also play important roles in the

effectiveness of RTS/CTS mechanisms.

With the presence of hidden stations, RTS/CTS mechanism introduces a tradeoff

between reducing the retransmission caused by hidden station problem and adding

control overhead. Throughput performance analysis in [11] and simulation results in [12]

both suggest the use of RTS/CTS in practical networks.

6. Future Work

Here I list some future work on the hidden station problem after the survey of its

current development.

(a). Control frame collision problem

Recall that [4] digs into the backoff algorithms in MACA and makes revisions to

improve the performance after the introduction of its RTS/CTS/DS/DATA/ACK

handshake. Noticing that current RTS/CTS mechanism introduces carrier sensing

(MACA and its variants do not have carrier sensing for RTS transmission), I believe that

analysis on the control frame collision problem should also be done on current RTS/CTS

mechanism to make the backoff algorithm more effective.

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(b). Hidden-station-aware protocols

Suppose stations are stationary, if all data transmissions use RTS/CTS mechanism, it

is not hard for a station to be aware of stations that are hidden from it. Consider Fig. 1.

Assume that A sends an RTS to B, then B replies with a CTS which will be heard by C.

By looking into the CTS frame, C can find out that the CTS is for station A. But since C

did not hear A’s RTS, C can realize that A is hidden from itself. The impact of such

awareness on the hidden station problem is yet to determine, but I believe that this is

helpful information that could be taken advantage of. Moreover, if this approach could be

taken, the node mobility issue needs to be addressed to guarantee that each node has up-

to-date hidden station information.

(c). Game theory approach

Throughput has been the major performance metrics. It is reasonable that we want to

maximize the utilization of the network. But for a station, its concerns might be selfish,

e.g., to maximize its own throughput. Specific to the hidden station problem, although a

formal proof is not there yet, I believe that in current IEEE 802.11, using RTS/CTS

mechanism gains a station better chance to get a hold of the medium since the IFS for

RTS (SIFS) is the shortest among all IFS’s. Of course, the tradeoff is that RTS/CTS

introduces the control overhead. The game theory point of view is to regard this situation

as a non-cooperative game in which each station is trying to maximize its own throughput

by action of whether to use RTS/CTS, when to trigger it (by configuring its own

dot11RTSThreshold), etc. I hope that the tools in game theory could help to give us a

new picture on this problem.

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