Power-Controlled Medium Access Control Protocol for Full-Duplex WiFi Networks

Abstract

Recent advances in signal processing have demonstrated in-band full-duplex capability at WiFi ranges. In addition to simultaneous two-way exchange between two nodes, full-duplex access points can potentially support simultaneous uplink and downlink flows. However, the atomic three-node topology, which allows simultaneous uplink and downlink, leads to inter-client interference. In this paper, we propose a random-access medium access control protocol using distributed power control to manage inter-client interference in wireless networks with full-duplex-capable access points that serve half-duplex clients. Our key contributions are two-fold. First, we identify the regimes in which power control provides sum throughput gains for the three-node atomic topology, with one uplink flow and one downlink flow. Second, we develop and benchmark PoCMAC, a full 802.11-based protocol that allows distributed selection of a three-node topology. The proposed MAC protocol is shown to achieve higher capacity as compared to an equivalent half-duplex counterpart, while maintaining similar fairness characteristics in single contention domain networks. We carried out extensive simulations and software-defined radio-based experiments to evaluate the performance of the proposed MAC protocol, which is shown to achieve a significant improvement over its half-duplex counterpart in terms of throughput performance.