A Distributed Medium Access Mechanism for In-band Full-duplex Wireless Networks

By current medium access control mechanisms designed for Half-duplex (HD), a node in distributed In-band Full-duplex (IBFD) wireless networks cannot identify the HD or IBFD transmission modes of the other nodes. This will decrease IBFD transmission opportunities by preventing simultaneous transmission in asymmetric dual link. In this paper, we propose a novel in-band Full-duplex Distributed Medium Access (FD-DMA) mechanism for wireless networks. Using this mechanism, both symmetric dual link and asymmetric dual link can be established by only one channel access. Moreover, all the neighbor nodes of primary transmitter and primary receiver can know exactly the IBFD transmission modes, which will increase the opportunity of IBFD communication and solve hidden nodes problem. The performance analysis and simulations show that the throughput of IBFD networks with FD-DMA mechanism nearly doubles that of the HD networks with RTS/CTS mechanism, and is much higher than that of IBFD networks with RTS/CTS mechanism.