SIM+: A simulator for full duplex communications

Recent studies have shown that wireless full duplex communication is possible with the help of multiple self-interference cancellation techniques. Previous works mainly focus on the design of the physical layer system, and study the performance between two nodes or a few nodes. The true potential of this new capability is still largely unknown in a general network setup. However, there are no large scale testbeds that do full duplex, hindering protocol and network system design developments with this new capability. Simulation has historically been key to making progress in the space of protocol and network system design. This paper presents the first network simulator that is capable of supporting full duplex communication. We extend the state-of-the-art network simulator, ns-3 and present SIM+. We enable many key features for a full duplex node within SIM+. A set of such MAC layer features for the full duplex receiver includes: sending a packet back to the transmitter, broadcasting busytone, and sending a packet to a secondary receiver. We provide some preliminary results using SIM+. Some of these results are counter-intuitive.