FuPlex: A Full Duplex MAC for the Next Generation WLAN

Abstract

Abstract-IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) has been increasingly developed over several decades. It requires four times throughput improvement in the next generation WLAN. Thus, researchers focus on the co-frequency co-time full duplex technology, which makes the devices transmit and receive packets simultaneously and theoretically doubles the throughput. Some existing works proposed several media access control (MAC) protocols on the assumption that all nodes have full duplex capability. However, it is more practicable that only AP possesses full duplex capability whereas STAs have no full duplex capability in the early stage of introducing full duplex technology into the next generation WLAN. In this paper, a simple and compatible full duplex MAC protocol named FuPlex is proposed. The design details of FuPlex, including primary access, secondary access and data transmission, are introduced. Simulation results show that FuPlex improves the throughput to 150% compared with legacy IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol.

Interference Aware Full-Duplex MAC Protocols Design and Evaluation for the Next WLANs

“…So far some full-duplex MAC protocols are proposed on the assumption that all nodes have full-duplex capability [15][16][17][18][19][20]. However, there are a few full-duplex MAC protocols considering the scenario that AP supports full-duplex capability but STAs do not support full-duplex capability [21][22][23]. In this paper, the rest of the paper is organized as follows.…”

“…At the same time, STA2 sends an A-MPDU frame to AP. After the A-MPDU transmission, AP and STA1 simultaneously transmit BA frames as described in [21]. Moreover, it is easy for STA2 to determine the number of MPDU in the transmitting A-MPDU frame, because the NAV duration minus 3 SIFS duration, a CTS transmission duration and a BA transmission duration is the period of the A-MPDU sent by AP.…”

“…In [21], a contention based full-duplex MAC protocol is proposed. In this MAC protocol, when AP transmits a data frame to a STA, the other STAs, which do not affect the transmission of legacy link by using interference measurement mechanism, starts a secondary back-off procedure, and the winner of STA acquires the chance of using the fullduplex link.…”

“…However, in most researchers assume that all the node in the network have full-duplex capability [15][16][17][18][19], and only a few researchers pay attention to study the full-duplex MAC protocols in which only AP has full-duplex capability and STAs have no full-duplex capability for WLANs [20][21][22]. In this paper, it is assumed that AP is a full-duplex node but STAs are all half-duplex nodes, and the co-existence between a full-duplex AP and half-duplex STAs should be considered.…”

“…So far, there are a lot of works focus on the full-duplex MAC design [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. However, in most researchers assume that all the node in the network have full-duplex capability [15][16][17][18][19], and only a few researchers pay attention to study the full-duplex MAC protocols in which only AP has full-duplex capability and STAs have no full-duplex capability for WLANs [20][21][22].…”