Modelling and Enhancing Full-Duplex MAC for Single-Hop 802.11 Wireless Networks

Abstract

Theoretically, full-duplex (FD) transmissions hold the promise of doubling the channel capacity. However, this capacity increase can not directly translate to the useful throughput at the medium access control (MAC) layer due to overheads. In this letter, we propose an enhanced full-duplex MAC (FD+) for improving the performance of wireless networks. We also present a simple analytic model for investigating what gains can be achieved at the MAC layer. The simple model for FD transmissions can accurately capture the new sub-scenarios of two-node simultaneous transmissions that are traditionally handled as collisions by IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF). The performance of FD+ is compared with DCF, a plain FD (FD-Plain) scheme and an FD MAC (FD-MAC) scheme from the literature. The analytic and simulation results show that FD+ is able to provide an average factor of 2.3 and 1.3 throughput increase against FD-Plain and FD-MAC, respectively.