Full Duplex Medium Access Control Protocol for Asymmetric Traffic

Abstract

Recent advancements in antenna design and signal processing have made it feasible to transmit and receive at the same time by using same carrier frequency, which is called in-band full-duplex (IBFD) wireless communications. Along with physical layer advancements, efficient medium access control (MAC) design is required to achieve optimum benefit from this latest technology. In this paper, a full-duplex MAC (FD-MAC) is proposed for a WLAN to support asymmetric length of traffic for uplink and downlink, which is named as Asym- MAC. The main feature of this MAC is that multiple users can transmit data to the access point (AP) during the transmission of a single downlink frame from AP. Moreover, there is no contention period and hence, there is no collision among the user terminals and AP for channel access. In Asym-MAC, AP always initiates the transmission. The performance of Asym-MAC is compared with the traditional half-duplex MAC (HD-MAC) and another proposed FD-MAC. Asym-MAC outperforms traditional HD-MAC by about 100% throughput gain. Moreover, this MAC shows higher throughput gain as compared to another existing FD-MAC and the throughput gain is about 67%. The results suggest that a significant throughput gain can be achieved by using this MAC, which can be used for future FD WLANs.