EFD-M2MMAC: An Enhanced Full-Duplex Many-to-Many MAC Protocol for Single-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless communication is a ubiquitous technology in our society, being present in a large variety of applications that in their progressive nature requires continuous improvements. Many technologies have been proposed to increase wireless network throughput and reduce the overall delay, such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO). The recent advances in wireless communication show the feasibility of a radio capable of concurrently transmitting and receiving data, i.e., in a full-duplex manner which has the potential to double the network throughput. This paper presents a novel full-duplex multi-user and multi-channel protocol that distinguishes from Full-Duplex Many-to-Many Multichannel MAC (FD-M2MMAC) [1] by employing a full-duplex radio with multi-user detection. We employed an analytical model in order to evaluate the protocol with previous related Many-to-Many Multichannel MAC (M2MMAC) [2] and FD-M2MMAC proposals. The mathematical results show that, by employing a combination of a full-duplex radio with V-BLAST (Vertical-Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time) capability, the proposed protocol uses the Communication window more efficiently and it was able to increase the throughput up to 56% when compared with FD-M2MMAC, using 6 antennas, at the same time that it attains 50% increase in throughput when compared with M2MMAC.