A Dual-Band Full-Duplex MAC for Infrastructure mmWave Networks: Protocol Design and Analysis

This paper proposes a dual-band full-duplex media access control (DB-FD MAC) protocol for infrastructure networks. Existing studies have adopted the dual-band strategy, separating control and data transmission to alleviate 'deafness' problem in millimeter-wave communications. However, it remains challenging to effectively coordinate dual-band resources and optimize full-duplex efficiency. To increase the total number of uplink access opportunities under a fixed contention-Time budget, we propose a contention-budget allocation mechanism between the μ Wave and mmWave bands. To address inter-station interference and fairness issues in full-duplex communications, we develop an interference-Aware station selection algorithm. In addition, we establish an enhanced Markov-chain-based analytical framework to derive closed-form throughput expressions under a finite contention-Time budget. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed DB-FD MAC protocol achieves a 44% throughput gain over the multi-band full-duplex MAC protocol, with improvements compared to other existing protocols.