Abstract
In-band full duplex wireless medium access control (MAC) protocol is essential in order to enable higher layers of the protocol stack to exploit the maximum benefits from physical layer full duplex technology. Unlike half duplex wireless local area network, a full duplex MAC protocol has to deal with several unique issues and challenges that arise because of the dynamic nature of the wireless environment. In this paper, we have discussed several existing full duplex MAC protocols and have shown qualitative comparisons among these full duplex MAC protocols. Full duplex in-band wireless communication has the potential to double the capacity of wireless network. Inter-client Interference (ICI) is a hindrance in achieving double spectral efficiency of the in-band full-duplex wireless medium. In this paper, we have classified existing solutions to the ICI problem and compared the solutions with respect to the proposed approaches, their advantages and disadvantages.We have also identified and discussed several issues and challenges of designing a full duplex MAC protocol. Results of qualitative comparisons of various wireless full duplex MAC protocols may be applied to design new protocols as well as researchers may find the identified issues and challenges helpful to solve various problems of a full duplex MAC protocol.
Highlights
At present, wireless local area networks (WLANs) are half duplex
It depends on the numerous factors such as spectral efficiency achieved by the medium access control (MAC) protocol, overheads incurred in MAC protocol, Multiple Access Interference (MAI), transmission impairments of the channel and so forth
In-band Full duplex wireless radio has the major potential to double the capacity of the wireless networks
Summary
Wireless local area networks (WLANs) are half duplex. The physical layer technologies of current wLANs do not support transmission and reception of wireless signal at the same time in the same frequency band. Several other issues such as uses of BEB, inter-node interference, inter-operability among half duplex and full duplex nodes, fairness in access time among nodes, synchronization of clocks during FD transmission have to be considered when it comes to design an FD-MAC for wireless LANs. A number of FD-MAC protocols have been proposed in the literature [3,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. No review has been carried out so far on the proposed solutions of Inter-Client Interference (ICI) which is a major problem in designing a in-band full-duplex MAC protocols for wireless networks.
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