Enhancement of full-duplex efficiency in an asymmetric IEEE 802.11-based WLAN

In this paper, we propose a new packet prioritization scheme in order to exploit the full-duplex (FD) capability of the access point (AP) more efficiently, in an asymmetric IEEE 802.11-based WLAN, i.e., only the AP has the in-band FD communications capability. In this respect, we consider a modified version of IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol such that at any transmission opportunity in which AP has the role of the transmitter or the receiver, it does the best to select a partner packet to be simultaneously received or transmitted, respectively. The key feature of our proposed partner packet selection scheme is to reduce the idle time intervals that in an FD transmission opportunity, due to different transmission times of the packet and its partner usually exist. To this end, we consider the packet lengths, the waiting time of the packets as well as the interfering effects of the two simultaneously active links on each other as the effective factors in prioritizing the packets to be selected as the partner. We map the problem onto finding a two-sided stable many-to-many matching table. Our numerical results indicate the high efficiency of the proposed scheme in exploiting the time, i.e., decreasing idle time intervals as well as increasing the throughput at the cost of controlled relaxation of the average delay.