Full-Duplex MAC Protocol Design and Analysis

The idea of in-band full-duplex (FD) communications has been revived in recent years owing to the significant progress in the self-interference cancellation and hardware design techniques, offering the potential to double spectral efficiency. The adaptations in upper layers are highly demanded in the design of FD communication systems. In this letter, we propose a novel medium access control (MAC) using FD techniques that allows transmitters to monitor the channel usage while transmitting, and backoff as soon as collision happens. Analytical saturation throughput of the FD-MAC protocol is derived with the consideration of imperfect sensing brought by residual self-interference (RSI) in the PHY layer. Both analytical and simulation results indicate that the normalized saturation throughput of the proposed FD-MAC can significantly outperforms conventional CSMA/CA under various network conditions.