A Game Theoretic Approach to Enhance DCF Performance in Full Duplex Ad-hoc WLANs

Physical Full Duplex (FD) operation in WLANs is a promising technology aiming at substituting the traditional Half Duplex (HD) functionality. An increased performance is expected which, theoretically, can be expressed as a double increase in system throughput. However, due to the initial design of the basic access method in WLANs, known as Distributed Coordination Function (DCF), this performance boost is poorly exhibited. Game theory is an invaluable tool to model the performance of Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols used in WLANs. In this paper, we exploit game theory to propose a simple enhancement to the DCF access method, in order to increase the benefit received when the FD capability is enabled in ad-hoc WLANs.