PQ-MAC: Exploiting Bidirectional Transmission Opportunities via Leveraging Peers’ Queuing Information for Full-Duplex WLAN

Full-duplex (FD) wireless is an attractive PHY technology with high potential to improve the throughput of WLAN due to bidirectional transmissions. However, existing FD MACs fail to fully take advantage of bidirectional transmissions because of neglecting a feature of FD wireless that whether to build bidirectional transmissions relies on the queuing state of peers. In this paper, we design PQ-MAC, the first FD MAC which exploits more bidirectional transmission opportunities by leveraging peers’ queuing information. Since PQ-MAC seizes the neglected but important feature, PQ-MAC can improve the performance with a slight transmission overhead. Simulations show that, in a 1-cell FD WLAN, PQ-MAC can achieve higher throughput than existing MACs when the buffer of AP is relatively small (≤200 frames). When the buffer of AP is relatively large (>200 frames), PQ-MAC can reduce the queuing delay without the loss of throughput.