Full-duplex MAC Protocol Design and Analysis

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel full-duplex MAC protocol that enhances spectral efficiency by allowing simultaneous transmission and sensing, with analytical and simulation results showing significant throughput improvements over traditional methods.

Contribution

A new FD-MAC protocol enabling channel monitoring during transmission and collision-based backoff, with analytical throughput analysis considering residual self-interference effects.

Findings

FD-MAC significantly outperforms CSMA/CA in throughput

Analytical model accounts for residual self-interference

Simulation confirms improved performance under various conditions

Abstract

The idea of in-band full-duplex (FD) communications revives in recent years owing to the significant progress in the self-interference cancellation and hardware design techniques, offering the potential to double spectral efficiency. The adaptations in upper layers are highly demanded in the design of FD communication systems. In this letter, we propose a novel medium access control (MAC) using FD techniques that allows transmitters to monitor the channel usage while transmitting, and backoff as soon as collision happens. Analytical saturation throughput of the FD-MAC protocol is derived with the consideration of imperfect sensing brought by residual self- interference (RSI) in the PHY layer. Both analytical and simulation results indicate that the normalized saturation throughput of the proposed FD-MAC can significantly outperforms conventional CSMA/CA under various network conditions.