Full Duplex Multiuser MIMO MAC Protocol (FD-MUMAC)

A new medium access control (MAC) protocol for full-duplex multiuser multi input multi output (FD-MUMAC) is proposed. FD-MUMAC is an 802.11 infrastructure-based MAC protocol where the communication in the network is moderated by a full-duplex access point (AP) that can handle multiple simultaneous uplink and downlink streams from half-duplex users. FD-MUMAC is the first MAC protocol that jointly determines the selection of uplink and downlink users and controls the transmission rate by considering transmit and receive beamforming, channel states, and multiuser-interferences. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed protocol, we introduce a joint fairness selection algorithm that ensures that each user obtains a fair allocation of time to utilize the channel and balances its traffic between the uplink and downlink directions. In one specific instantiation, FD-MUMAC achieves a throughput gain of 59%, 177% and 94% compared with a single antenna FD MAC protocol and two half-duplex MU-MIMO protocols, respectively.