  Recently, several working implementations of in--band full--duplex wireless
systems have been presented, where the same node can transmit and receive
simultaneously in the same frequency band. The introduction of such a
possibility at the physical layer could lead to improved performance but also
poses several challenges at the MAC layer. In this paper, an innovative
mechanism of channel contention in full--duplex OFDM wireless networks is
proposed. This strategy is able to ensure efficient transmission scheduling
with the result of avoiding collisions and effectively exploiting full--duplex
opportunities. As a consequence, considerable performance improvements are
observed with respect to standard and state--of--the--art MAC protocols for
wireless networks, as highlighted by extensive simulations performed in ad hoc
wireless networks with varying number of nodes.
