Rate selection based medium access control for full-duplex asymmetric transmission

Abstract

The realization of full-duplex wireless communication is predictable. And asymmetric transmission is a practical and low-cost application scenario, where full-duplex access point (FD_AP) can communicate with two users simultaneously to receive and send packets. While, in an asymmetric transmission, the transmit power of uplink sender decides the uplink and downlink rates because of the inter-client interference, which accordingly restricts the throughput. Besides, the size of packets in uplink and downlink is generally unequal. Therefore, a WIFI network with a FD_AP and half-duplex users is studied in this paper, and a medium access control (MAC) protocol based on power control and rate selection (PCRS) is proposed. PCRS MAC employs a received signal strength based rate selection strategy to select different rates and power for uplink and downlink transmission. Then, FD_AP can establish efficient and reliable full-duplex asymmetric transmission. Simulation results show that PCRS can improve the throughput and the probability of successful asymmetric communication as compared to the distributed coordination function (DCF) and a simple full-duplex MAC protocol without PCRS. Besides, PCRS MAC also maintains a high level of fairness.