Fairness and Delay in Heterogeneous Half- and Full-Duplex Wireless Networks

Abstract

Full-duplex (FD) wireless is an attractive communication paradigm with high potential for improving network capacity and reducing delay in wireless networks. Despite significant progress on the physical layer development, the challenges associated with developing medium access control (MAC) protocols for heterogeneous networks composed of both legacy half-duplex (HD) and emerging FD devices have not been fully addressed. In [1], we focused on the design and performance evaluation of scheduling algorithms for heterogeneous HD-FD networks and presented the distributed Hybrid-Greedy Maximal Scheduling (H-GMS) algorithm. H-GMS combines the centralized Greedy Maximal Scheduling (GMS) and a distributed queue-based random-access mechanism, and is throughput-optimal. In this paper, we analyze the delay performance of H-GMS by deriving two lower bounds on the average queue length. We also evaluate the fairness and delay performance of H-GMS via extensive simulations. We show that in heterogeneous HD-FD networks, H-GMS achieves$16-30\times$ better delay performance and improves fairness between FD and HD users by up to 50% compared with the fully decentralized Q-CSMA algorithm.