A new reservation-based Medium-Access Control for full-duplex WLANs

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Kim, Chulmin | Kim, Cheeha^{; *}

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology, Pohang, Republic of Korea

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 54 279 2252; Fax: +82 54 279 2299; E-mail: [email protected].

Abstract: In-band simultaneous transmission between an access point (AP) and a node was enabled by recent full-duplex radio communication research. While this event was expected to increase throughput within the feasibility of full-duplex radio communication, the conventional Medium Access Control (MAC) Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) protocol in wireless local area networks (WLAN) limits this performance enhancement. Each node competes for transmission opportunities because DCF is based on half-duplex communication principles. The competition among nodes and an AP creates excessive overhead and many collisions. In this paper, we propose a new MAC protocol called Reservation-Based Medium-Access Control (RMAC) based on node reservation in WLAN with full-duplex radio. RMAC is compatible with DCF. RMAC decreases collisions by reducing the number of competing nodes and increases throughput by reducing competition overhead. Our RMAC assures nodes a transmission opportunity without collision if a node has several packets to send. We show that RMAC achieves at least 86.3% more throughput than full-duplex radio based on DCF. The RMAC protocol also maintains high throughput even in cases of dense node deployment.

Keywords: Wireless LAN, computer networks, full-duplex radio, Medium Access Control

DOI: 10.3233/JHS-170565

Journal: Journal of High Speed Networks, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 187-199, 2017