Frequency Domain Coordination MAC Protocol for Full-Duplex Wireless Networks

Abstract

A full-duplex radio allows packets to be transmitted and received simultaneously using self-interference cancellation technologies. Thus, it can double the channel capacity compared with the half-duplex radio. Since conventional medium access control (MAC) protocols were designed for the half-duplex radio, the potential capacity of the full-duplex radio cannot be utilized. In this letter, we propose a full-duplex MAC protocol using frequency domain coordination to fully utilize the full-duplex radio and to increase coordination efficiency. The proposed MAC protocol uses subchannels to efficiently collect transmission requests from stations and to schedule packet transmissions without competition. Our evaluation results show that the throughput of the proposed MAC protocol significantly outperforms previous studies.