The below is an example pcap which shows the trigger of RTS and CTS in a data exchange over WiFi.
RTS-CTS is one of the mechanism which AP and client use to ensure delivery of data packets especially when the environment is detected as noisy.
Below pcap shows the AP’s attempt to increase the data rate of transmission but failed to get Ack
This triggered the use of RTS and CTS for some time.
As we can see in the below example , though RTS CTS was triggered it still failed to get the ACK and AP realised that it has to come back to old datarate
Continuous attempt to send data at a higher data rate are handled by AP’s rate adaptation logic.
Its interesting to find out how each system handles the airtime efficiency especially in non ideal environments or in the real environments.
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