Wireless Full-Duplex Medium Access Control for Enhancing Energy Efficiency

Recent years have witnessed a proliferation of battery-powered mobile devices, e.g., smartphones, tablets, sensors, and laptops, leading to a significant demand for high capacity wireless communication with high energy efficiency. Among the technologies capable of such efficiency is full-duplex wireless communication, based on the simultaneous uplink and downlink data transmission with limited frequency resources. Previous studies on full-duplex wireless mostly focused on doubling the network capacity, whereas in this paper we discuss how full-duplex wireless can also increase the energy efficiency. We propose low-power communication by wireless full-duplexing (LPFD), taking advantage of the fact that in full-duplex the duration of communication is half that of half-duplex communication. In LPFD, by using the sleep state in which the transceiver in the wireless communication terminal is turned off, the power consumption of the wireless communication terminal is reduced, and the energy efficiency is improved.