In-Band Full-Duplex Communications for Cellular Networks with Partial Uplink/Downlink Overlap

In-band full-duplex (FD) communications have been optimistically promoted to improve the spectrum utilization in cellular networks. However, the explicit impact of spatial interference, imposed by FD communications, on uplink and downlink transmissions has been overlooked in the literature. This paper presents an extensive study of the explicit effect of FD communications on the uplink and downlink performances. For the sake of rigorous analysis, we develop a tractable framework based on stochastic geometry toolset. The developed model accounts for uplink truncated channel inversion power control in FD cellular networks. The study shows that FD communications improve the downlink throughput at the expense of significant degradation in the uplink throughput. Therefore, we propose a novel fine-grained duplexing scheme, denoted as $\alpha$-duplex scheme, which allows a partial overlap between uplink and downlink frequency bands. To this end, we show that the amount of the overlap can be optimized via adjusting $\alpha$ to achieve a certain design objective.Comment: To be presented in IEEE Globecom 201

Opportunistic Scheduling for Full-Duplex Uplink-Downlink Networks

We study opportunistic scheduling and the sum capacity of cellular networks with a full-duplex multi-antenna base station and a large number of single-antenna half-duplex users. Simultaneous uplink and downlink over the same band results in uplink-to-downlink interference, degrading performance. We present a simple opportunistic joint uplink-downlink scheduling algorithm that exploits multiuser diversity and treats interference as noise. We show that in homogeneous networks, our algorithm achieves the same sum capacity as what would have been achieved if there was no uplink-to-downlink interference, asymptotically in the number of users. The algorithm does not require interference CSI at the base station or uplink users. It is also shown that for a simple class of heterogeneous networks without sufficient channel diversity, it is not possible to achieve the corresponding interference-free system capacity. We discuss the potential for using device-to-device side-channels to overcome this limitation in heterogeneous networks.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, to appear at IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT) '1

Limits on the Capacity of In-Band Full Duplex Communication in Uplink Cellular Networks

Simultaneous co-channel transmission and reception, denoted as in-band full duplex (FD) communication, has been promoted as an attractive solution to improve the spectral efficiency of cellular networks. However, in addition to the self-interference problem, cross-mode interference (i.e., between uplink and downlink) imposes a major obstacle for the deployment of FD communication in cellular networks. More specifically, the downlink to uplink interference represents the performance bottleneck for FD operation due to the uplink limited transmission power and venerable operation when compared to the downlink counterpart. While the positive impact of FD communication to the downlink performance has been proved in the literature, its effect on the uplink transmission has been neglected. This paper focuses on the effect of downlink interference on the uplink transmission in FD cellular networks in order to see whether FD communication is beneficial for the uplink transmission or not, and if yes for which type of network. To quantify the expected performance gains, we derive a closed form expression of the maximum achievable uplink capacity in FD cellular networks. In contrast to the downlink capacity which always improves with FD communication, our results show that the uplink performance may improve or degrade depending on the associated network parameters. Particularly, we show that the intensity of base stations (BSs) has a more prominent effect on the uplink performance than their transmission power