In-band full-duplex medium access control design for heterogeneous wireless LAN

Full-duplex (FD) wireless communication is evolving into a practical technique, and many studies are being conducting in this area, especially regarding the physical layer. However, to exploit FD benefit successfully, efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols are crucial as well as physical layer advances. Numerous FD-MAC protocols have been proposed, but these MAC protocols cannot address all the issues encountered in this area. In addition, many half-duplex (HD) capable devices are present in existing wireless local area networks (WLANs), so there is an urgent need to integrate FD clients and HD clients in the same WLAN. We refer to this type of WLAN as a heterogeneous WLAN (Het-WLAN). In this paper, we propose an FD-MAC for Het-WLAN, which considers all possible types of FD transmissions. Our proposed FD-MAC protocol suppresses inter-user interference. Simulation results demonstrated that a significant throughput gain (about 96%) could be achieved by using our proposed FD-MAC compared with traditional HD communications. Moreover, our proposed MAC obtained better performance (average throughput gain of about 11%) compared with another existing FD-MAC design. In addition, probability analysis suggested that the total probability of FD transmissions increased rapidly as the WLAN approached saturation conditions.