Asymmetric Simultaneous Transmit and Receive in WiFi Networks

Many researchers expect to see the efficiency of wireless local area networks (WLANs) increased by in-band simultaneous transmit and receive (STR). While insufficient suppression of self-interference has been a major obstacle to implementing the STR capability, an even bigger obstacle is the fact that enabling STR involves significant modification to the current IEEE 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol. In this paper, we propose MASTaR, a novel MAC protocol that enables STR in 802.11 WLAN using standard-compliant methods. The feasibility and performance of MASTaR are extensively evaluated via 3-D ray-tracing-based simulation. The simulation results demonstrate that significant performance enhancement, e.g., up to 2.58× higher throughput than the current 802.11 MAC protocol, can be achieved by an STR-capable access point.