Medium access control for a wireless LAN with a full duplex AP and half duplex stations

Full duplex wireless communications have become practical in recent years. However, there exist many communication nodes that only support half duplex communications. Thus, it is important to consider coexistence between full duplex and half duplex communications. In this paper, a wireless LAN with a full duplex AP and half duplex stations is studied, and a media access control(MAC) protocol is developed to ensure effective operation of such a wireless LAN. The MAC protocol explores capture effect to establish dual links between two different stations and the AP to improve network throughput. Furthermore, it does not need any change in the physical layer of half duplex stations; only an update of MAC driver is required. Thus, the MAC protocol is well suited for supporting legacy half duplex stations. Simulation results show that the new MAC protocol improve throughput by 39% and 180% as compared to the MAC protocol of 802.11 DCF with and without RTS/CTS, respectively. More interestingly, throughput performance of the new MAC protocol remains steady as the number of stations grows.