Analysis of asymmetry of traffic in full-duplex wireless local area network

Abstract

The standard commodity wireless hardware is half-duplex because there are challenges in full-duplex wireless that need attention and improvement. The self-interference in radios is one of the big challenges, but, even though there is no standard yet, there are several proposals that cancel enough self-interference that it is possible for communication to be successfully made. The standard half-duplex rules of the media access control (MAC) protocol contained on wireless cards do not accept simultaneous transmissions, because simultaneous transmissions are likely to collide with each other. Therefore, full-duplex wireless networks need a new MAC protocol to be able to handle the different full-duplex transmissions, namely, symmetric and symmetric. Symmetric full-duplex transmissions ocurr between just two stations, which can be managed trivially by a suitable MAC protocol. On the other hand, asymmetric transmissions occur in communications involving three stations, and those transmissions are likely to produce collisions if one station receives simultaneously signals from the two others. From the different difficulties of each transmission type, emerges the doubt about how many opportunities are there for a full-duplex wireless network to make each type of transmission. With the focus on this question, this research proposes a method to collect traffic data from a real half-duplex wireless local area network (WLAN) to measure the amount of full-duplex symmetric and asymmetric transmission opportunities. The proposed method relies on: the brcmfmac driver, to collect the traffic data in kernel space; the Ftrace tracing utility framework, to send the data from kernel to user space; a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, in which is installed the modified driver and tracing utility; and an estimate of the travel time of frames between the kernel and firmware. The results of this research include a method to collect traffic data with the goal of measuring the amount of full-duplex transmissions opportunities and their types in a real half-duplex WLAN. It is also presented the analysis of a small amount of data collected during four days as an example of the proposed method, which shows that 4.096% of the frames presented the proper conditions to symmetric transmissions, while only 0.025% in the case of asymmetric transmissions.