FDOE: Exploit Concurrent Communication Opportunities in Full-Duplex Wireless Mesh Networks

In recent years, full-duplex communications in a single frequency channel have become a practical technology. However, existing full-duplex medium access control (MAC) protocols can hardly take full advantages of full-duplex transmission opportunities, because they are not capable of adding one more half-duplex link on an on-going half-duplex link to form a full-duplex link. Besides, the exposed-node issue in multi-hop wireless networks limits flexible establishment of full-duplex links. Such limitations waste full-duplex transmission opportunities, and thus degrade network performance. In this paper, an efficient full-duplex link establishment protocol called full-duplex opportunity exploitation (FDOE) is developed to exploit full-duplex transmission opportunities in a wireless mesh network. FDOE leverages rateless coding and pseudo-noise (PN) sequences to establish a full-duplex link whenever a full-duplex transmission opportunity is available. Such a distinct feature leads to significant improvement of network performance. FDOE is evaluated through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations. Performance results show that FDOE exploits full-duplex transmission opportunities efficiently in wireless mesh networks, and thus significantly outperforms existing MAC protocols.