Energy-Delay Analysis of Full Duplex Wireless Communication for Sensor Networks

Full duplex wireless communication is a promising new technique that enables the simultaneous transmission and reception of a packet on the same frequency. Until now most research focused on proving the feasibility of full duplex Wi-Fi systems, focusing mainly on PHY layer analysis of the BER or PER. In this paper, the use of full duplex in wireless sensor networks is analysed, and it is shown that this can enable significant energy and delay gains, even when considering a realistic MAC protocol. This paper presents a novel full duplex energy model and MAC protocol for wireless sensor networks, compatible with realistic 802.15.4 chips and the standard MAC protocol. We show the potential of full duplex sensor networks, both for networks with low and high loads. Especially for high loads, full duplex enables a promising collision detection, avoiding wasting scarce resources in long packet collisions. Full duplex nodes outperform half duplex nodes both in terms of energy as in terms of delay, even in case of asymmetric traffic conditions. In addition, several advantages exist in terms of fairness of downlink traffic towards uplink traffic.