An opportunistic MAC protocol for full duplex wireless LANs

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an opportunistic MAC protocol for full duplex communications in WLANs. The proposed MAC protocol solves the problem of channel under-utilization that occur in the FD environment. Depending on the transmission time difference between uplink and downlink transmissions, a secondary backoff is performed to enable additional transmission to the under-utilized parts. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed MAC protocol can improve the throughput and solve the problem of channel under-utilization.