Analyzing a full-duplex cellular system

TLDR

Recent advances in single‑channel full‑duplex radio design have attracted attention and promise to transform wireless networks that currently rely on half‑duplex operation. This study investigates the impact of deploying SC‑FD base stations alongside legacy mobile stations in a cellular system. The authors employ a stochastic‑geometry multi‑cell analytical model and corroborate its predictions with extensive OFDMA simulations. Results show that full‑duplex operation significantly boosts system capacity, though it falls short of doubling it, and that uplink traffic is more vulnerable to self‑interference than downlink.

Abstract

Recent progress in single channel full-duplex (SC-FD) radio design [1]-[4] has attracted the attention of many researchers. A SC-FD transceiver is capable of transmitting and receiving on the same frequency at the same time, which will have a great impact on the design and performance of current wireless networks that are based on half duplex designs. This paper analyzes the effects of adopting SC-FD enabled base stations in a cellular system with legacy mobile stations. We use a multi-cell analytical model based on stochastic geometry to derive the theoretical performance gain of such a system. To validate the performance using a realistic setting, we conduct extensive simulations for a multi-cell OFDMA system. Both sets of results show that a full-duplex design for a cellular system, while not quite doubling system capacity, does greatly increases capacity over traditional cellular systems. Our results show that the uplink, compared with the downlink, is more susceptible to the extra interference caused by using the same frequency in both directions.