An efficient MAC scheme for full-duplex communications on wireless networks

The increasing demands for high-data rate traffic stimulated the development of the fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks. The envisioned 5G networks is expected to meet its challenge by devising means to further improve spectrum usage. Full-duplex antennas and efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols are expected to play a major role in the foreseeable 5G networks. In this context, this paper presents a MAC layer technique to improve channel reservation time when full-duplex antennas are employed. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme provides throughput 156% higher than a state-of-the-art full-duplex protocol. When compared to traditional half-duplex antenna MAC protocols, throughput improvement of the proposed scheme reaches up to 412%.