FD-OMAC: A Novel Full-Duplex Optical Media Access Control for IEEE 802.15.7

Optical wireless communication (OWC), the IEEE 802.15.7 standard (revised 2018) is developed in normative reference to low-rate wireless personal area networks IEEE 802.15.4 standard. One significant difference between the two standards is the highly directional transmitters in the OWC networks. This difference opens up the possibility of adding full-duplex communication to wireless networks. Our work proposes adding full-duplex functionality in the contention-free period (CFP) of the OWC media access control (MAC) layer. We justify the significance of our proposal by implementing IEEE 802.15.7 resource allocation scheme for both our proposed full-duplex optical MAC (FD-OMAC) and the IEEE 802.15.7 MAC. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed work improves the spectral efficiency in the CFP without compromising delays. We also discuss the minor changes required in the IEEE 802.15.7 MAC for implementing FD-OMAC. We further extend the FD-OMAC to a multiple access point network and evaluate its performance in comparison with IEEE 802.15.7 MAC.