Performance Analysis of WRAN in Light of Full Duplex Capability

IEEE 802.22 is a wireless regional area network (WRAN) standard that works on cognitive radios, allowing sharing of unused spectrum allocated to television services on a non-interfering basis. This standard is helpful in providing data services to rural areas with less population. IEEE 802.22 has three operations: transmission, reception and sensing of data. This standard operates on half duplex mode where not only transmission and reception by a participating station occurs at different times, but sensing of a channel is also not allowed while transmission is going on at any node. This reduces the spectrum usage. Recent developments have shown that full duplex communication, i.e., concurrent transmission and reception by a node, is possible even in wireless networks. The full duplex operation helps in increasing the throughput and reduces collisions. In this paper, our attempt is to explore the possibility of exploiting full duplex capabilities of wireless nodes in IEEE 802.22 WRAN by allowing a node to perform the process of channel sensing while it is engaged in transmission of some data. The simulation results show noticeably good performance enhancement of WRAN in terms of throughput by 9% which leads to efficient usage of spectrum without inviting increased interference.