Performance analysis of infrastructure WLANs with multi-packet reception and full-duplex radio

Abstract

In order to mitigate collisions among stations in wireless local area networks (WLANs), the adoption of multi-packet reception (MPR), which is generally implementable by the multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission technique, has been discussed extensively in the literature. Although MPR can efficiently mitigate collisions in uplink WLANs, it still results in the unbalancing problem between uplink and downlink in infrastructure WLANs. In this paper, we take the advantage of the promising wireless transmission technique, full-duplex radio which supports simultaneous transmission and reception at each antenna, to balance the uplink and downlink traffic. We propose a new full-duplex medium access control (FD-MAC) protocol to fully discover the potential of the full-duplex radio technique in WLANs. Moreover, we propose a mathematical model to analyze the throughput performance of FD-MAC under the saturation traffic condition. Numerical results show that our proposed protocol can efficiently balance the uplink and downlink throughput while also introducing significant throughput enhancement.