Collision Tolerance and Throughput Gain in Full-Duplex IEEE 802.11 DCF

As WiFi networks become more prevalent, there is more demand to accommodate increasing data traffic over WiFi. Traditional methods have been heavily used to improve the performance of wireless systems, and enough improvements have been introduced to exhaust channel capacity close to the maximum theoretical limits. Thus, to meet the ever increasing demand, Full-Duplex (FD) communications are enabled by Self-Interference Cancellation (SIC) to theoretically double channel capacity. SIC is possible for WiFi signals due to the lower transmit power, which makes WiFi under IEEE 802.11 standard a strong candidate for FD techniques. In this paper, we provide matching analytical and simulation results to explore how packet collisions are reduced and how throughput increases when FD methods are implemented for IEEE 802.11. Additionally, a collision-free mode enabled by FD communications is explored for WiFi systems. Simulation results show that the proposed analytical FD framework for IEEE 802.11 is accurate even when randomness is established in simulation scenarios.