Software-based In-Band Full Duplex Relays for IEEE 802.11a/g/p: An Experimental Study

Ful1-Duplex (FD) relay systems have the potential to overcome various system-inherent deficiencies of existing infrastructure relays. In contrast to traditional Half-Duplex (HD) relaying systems, in-band FD relays can simultaneously receive and forward, which improve the channel utilization and reduces the end-to-end delay in a multi-hop network significantly. Despite many theoretical works on FD relaying, there is still no widely available implementation that is compliant with standards such as IEEE 802.11a/g/p. Building upon our previous work, we present such an implementation using the GNU Radio framework. In this paper, we present the performance comparison results with our IEEE 802.11a/g/p compliant relay implementation from a system-level perspective by means of over-the-air experiments in an indoor setup. The first results demonstrate the potential of our Full-Duplex Relay (FDR) implementation and the practical performance in comparison to HD relaying in terms of packet delivery ratio, and physical layer latency.