3D pipeline contention: Asymmetric full duplex in wireless networks

Coordination among users is an indispensable part in wireless networks for efficient medium access. Alone with the rapid increase of transmission rate, however, coordination time becomes insufferable. We present AFD, namely asymmetric full duplex, to achieve high coordination efficiency at nearly zero overhead. In AFD, channel contention is performed simultaneously with data transmission. We propose a 3D pipeline contention scheme where the contention process is divided into several parallel stages and executed in a pipelined manner in a 3D domain specified by time, frequency and spatial antenna. To mitigate the interference between the data packet and the contention signal, we adopt a singleton PN sequence as a contention pilot. AFD provides a novel network-scale full duplex capability. The performance is evaluated by both simulations and measurements in a testbed. AFD outperforms IEEE 802.11 significantly, i.e., the Jain´s fairness index is around 0.95 with a throughput gain up to 120%.