Throughput performance of two-way relaying in IEEE 802.11 networks

Conventional half-duplex relaying suffers from a pre-log factor of 1/2 in the capacity equation which reduces the spectral efficiency significantly. On the other hand half-duplex two-way relaying, which can compensate this spectrum efficiency loss and could be a suitable substitute for conventional relaying, requires two nodes to transmit at the same time and frequency. Therefore to realise two-way relaying a modification of the current IEEE 802.11/e Medium Access Control (MAC) is necessary. In this paper we propose an appropriate MAC scheme for two-way relaying. The main objective is to investigate for realistic network configurations how much the throughput is improved by two-way and semi-two-way relaying under the proposed MAC compared to conventional relaying.