A High-Throughput Full-Duplex MAC Protocol Design and Analysis for Asymmetric Traffic Networks

In recent years, in-band full duplex (IBFD) has garnered significant attention in wireless communications due to its potential to enhance spectral efficiency. To fully exploit the benefits of IBFD, we design a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs), which takes into account the realities of asymmetric traffic. However, key challenges involve inter-station interference within asymmetric topologies and wastage of idle time slots under asymmetric traffic conditions. We propose a successive full-duplex communication (SFD) protocol, integrating a CSMA/CA-based uplink selection mechanism and a weight-based downlink selection algorithm to minimize interference probabilities. Furthermore, SFD incorporates a control frame structure, power control algorithm, and successive interference cancellation (SuIC) technique to address the challenge of control frame interference in continuous IBFD communication. Both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluations demonstrate that SFD achieves a 52% increase in throughput compared to the 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) with Request to Send/Clear to Send (RTS/CTS) and a 25% improvement over A-Duplex.