Performance of Medium Access Control Protocols for Full-Duplex Wireless LANs

In this paper, we propose a medium access control (MAC) protocol for improving throughput in full-duplex WLANs. The proposed MAC protocol introduces a dynamic contention window (CW) control at access point (AP) to increase the opportunity for full- duplex operations. In the proposed MAC protocol, a threshold is set in the transmission queue length in APs. Small and large CWs are used adaptively. When the transmission queue length of an AP exceeds the threshold, the small CW is used for backoff time calculation, which prioritizes the AP´s transmission opportunity. On the other hand, when the transmission queue length of an AP does not exceed the threshold, the large CW is used for backoff time calculation, which prioritizes client nodes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to consider the contention window control for increasing the opportunity of full-duplex operation. From some simulated results, we show that the proposed MAC protocol is effective to improve throughput in full- duplex WLANs thanks to the adaptive control of contention window at AP.