A full duplex MAC protocol for efficient asymmetric transmission in WLAN

Abstract

As full duplex radio communication is introduced, it is expected to double the throughput theoretically over full duplex radio for one-to-one communication. However, in the practical environment, it is hard to find such an application that demands the same amount of traffic in the both directions at the same time. To enhance the throughput as much as possible, we need to arrange medium accesses in a different way, not like the contention-based MAC. In this paper, we propose an efficient MAC protocol to maximize throughput for OFDM-based full duplex radio. Our proposed MAC protocol finds stations with uplink traffic in the hidden relation with the station for downlink traffic and provides them transmission opportunities to balance the amount of traffic in the both direction. Our protocol requires one OFDM subcarrier only. Our protocol can achieve higher throughput as compared with that of legacy half duplex MAC protocol and that of basic full duplex MAC protocol.