Full Duplex Medium Access Control Design for Heterogeneous WLAN

Full duplex (FD) wireless communication has an enormous prospect in near future. To leverage the FD benefit successfully, efficient medium access control (MAC) protocols are very crucial along with physical layer performance. Although a number of FD-MAC protocols were proposed earlier, most of them are not for wireless local area networks (WLANs). On the other hand, as still there are a lot of half duplex (HD) capable devices in existing WLANs, the integration of FD clients and HD clients in the same WLAN is an urgent need. This type of WLAN can be named as heterogeneous WLAN (Het-WLAN). In this paper, we proposed a FD-MAC for the Het-WLAN, where all possible cases of FD transmission are considered. Our proposed FD-MAC protocol suppresses inter-user interference. The simulation result shows that a significant throughput gain (about 50%) can be achieved by using our proposed FD-MAC as compared to traditional HD communications. Moreover, this MAC is compared with another existing FD-MAC design and our proposed MAC shows a better performance (average throughput gain is 11%) with comparing to that existing one. In addition, the probability analysis suggests that the probability of FD transmissions increases as the number of total clients increases, when the WLAN is not in saturation condition.