An RTS–CTS based medium access control protocol for full-duplex wireless local area networks

Abstract

In-band full-duplex (IB-FD) wireless is a promising next generation communication technology which can double the spectral efficiency with respect to the conventional in-band half-duplex (IB-HD) radio. Hidden stations degrade the performances of any practical wireless networks, but unlike IB-HD networks, hidden station scenarios are different in IB-FD wireless networks. In this paper, we have presented a novel energy-efficient medium access control protocol exploiting the network allocation vector, whereby mitigating the hidden station problem in an IB-FD wireless network. Moreover, an analytical model has been devised to unveil the impact of the distance between a primary–secondary transceiver pair in order to select a secondary receiver to initiate a successful relay like IB-FD link, thereby diminishing the inter-station interference problem. In addition, we have shown that the number of IB-FD transmission link increases if the secondary transmitter uses adaptive transmission power. We have evaluated the performance of the proposed protocol through detailed simulations using a modified version of NS-3 in which the wireless module has been re-designed to accommodate the concept of IB-FD radio. Results show that our proposed protocol achieves at least 61% and 41% throughput gain and consumes 58% and 60% lower energy than IEEE 802.11 DCF RTS–CTS and FD-MAC protocols, respectively. Our proposed protocol outperforms the baseline protocols with respect to throughput, energy consumption, average re-transmission rate, average packet drop rate, etc. The proposed scheme can be very useful to IB-FD wireless networks which contain bandwidth-hungry applications.