An OFDMA two-symbol coordination MAC protocol for full-duplex wireless networks

Abstract

In-band full-duplex radio technology enables simultaneous transmission and reception, which may double the throughput of half-duplex radio in one-to-one communication. Unfortunately, medium access control (MAC) protocols for the half-duplex radio hardly make use of the potential capacity of the full-duplex radio since simultaneous transmission and reception is limited when the receiver has no data to send. Furthermore, orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) is being seriously considered as a key multiple access technology for the next-generation wireless local area network (WLAN), e.g., IEEE 802.11ax. In this paper, we propose a novel MAC protocol for full-duplex OFDMA wireless networks, which extends the concurrent transmission opportunities as much as possible and resolves contention with the minimum overhead. In particular, our MAC protocol is targeted at densely populated access point based WLAN. The performance evaluation shows that our MAC significantly increases the overall network throughput compared to a recently introduced MAC for full-duplex radio.