Hybrid MAC Protocol for Full Duplex Wi-Fi Networks

Recently, the in-band full-duplex (FD) capability has been demonstrated at Wi-Fi range. However, the simultaneous uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) transmission may lead to inter-user interference (IUI). In this paper, we propose a hybrid MAC protocol, in which the AP decides the probability of constructing FD transmission. The protocol also adopts a second fold of RTS/CTS mechanism to prevent the constructed transmission from being affected by the IUI. The second fold RTS/CTS mechanism and the probability for FD transmission are optimized respectively to maximize the expected spectrum efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed MAC protocol achieves higher capacity compared to a half-duplex counterpart in terms of both UL and DL throughput.