In-frame querying to utilize full duplex communication in IEEE 802.11ax

The IEEE 802.11 standard based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) is the most popular and widely deployed communication protocol in the world. It is anticipated that WLAN will drive the future communication systems in order to provide more data rate for more users. IEEE 802.11ax is one of the most promising and advanced standards among the drafts. Full duplex radio with self-interference cancellation is highly anticipated to be incorporated into IEEE 802.11ax standard. However, according to the empirical study of WLAN usage patterns showing extreme unbalance between uplink and downlink traffic, there may be plenty of wasted opportunities that naive full duplex MAC protocols cannot utilize. To extend those opportunities, we develop In-frame Querying method to instantly find the candidate stations which are able to support the full duplex capability with AP. We conduct computer simulations to evaluate the performance gain of In-frame Querying method for full duplex communication in IEEE 802.11ax. Our results show that In-frame Querying is a simple and robust scheme to improve the throughput significantly compared to the legacy methods in WLAN.