  Full duplex communication promises a paradigm shift in wireless networks by
allowing simultaneous packet transmission and reception within the same
channel. While recent prototypes indicate the feasibility of this concept,
there is a lack of rigorous theoretical development on how full duplex impacts
medium access control (MAC) protocols in practical wireless networks. In this
paper, we formulate the first analytical model of a CSMA/CA based full duplex
MAC protocol for a wireless LAN network composed of an access point serving
mobile clients. There are two major contributions of our work: First, our
Markov chain-based approach results in closed form expressions of throughput
for both the access point and the clients for this new class of networks.
Second, our study provides quantitative insights on how much of the classical
hidden terminal problem can be mitigated through full duplex. We specifically
demonstrate that the improvement in the network throughput is up to 35-40\%
over the half duplex case. Our analytical models are verified through packet
level simulations in ns-2. Our results also reveal the benefit of full duplex
under varying network configuration parameters, such as number of hidden
terminals, client density, and contention window size.
