Hidden-Node Problem in Full-Duplex Enabled CSMA Networks

The in-band full-duplexing is a promising technique to boost wireless network throughput by allowing a node to transmit and receive simultaneously. This paper provides a comprehensive investigation on the hidden-node problem that arises in the full-duplex (FD) enabled carrier-sensing multiple-access (CSMA) networks. In particular, we first provide the fundamental conditions that guarantee successful receptions for all the FD transmission cases, and propose an ellipse interference model and an ellipse carrier-sensing model to capture the interference relations and the carrier-sensing mechanism in FD CSMA networks, respectively. We further establish the hidden-node-free design in FD CSMA networks. Specifically, we show the sufficient conditions on the carrier-sensing power threshold that can eliminate hidden-node collisions. We show that compared with half-duplex CSMA networks, the FD CSMA network needs a much smaller carrier-sensing power threshold to prevent hidden-node collisions, which leads to poor network spatial reuse. This motivates us to further propose a new medium access control (MAC) protocol with Full-duplex Enhanced Carrier-Sensing (FECS) mechanism. The FECS-MAC enables the secondary carrier-sensing before starting the secondary transmission. We show that with the secondary carrier-sensing design, the required carrier-sensing powerthreshold can be increased while keeping the network hidden-node free. Therefore, the network spatial reuse and throughput can be significantly improved. Simulation results demonstrate that the FECS-MAC can improve the throughput of dense three-node FD networks by more than 30 percent, compared with relay full-duplex (RFD) MAC protocol proposed in [1].