Improving small cell capacity with common-carrier full duplex radios

TLDR

Full‑duplex radios operating on a single channel have recently attracted growing research interest. The study aims to extend full‑duplex radios to small‑cell, resource‑managed LTE‑like systems and to identify conditions under which full duplex yields higher throughput than half duplex. A hybrid scheduler that defaults to half duplex but opportunistically assigns full‑duplex timeslots is proposed, and its throughput and energy‑efficiency performance is compared to a traditional half‑duplex scheduler. Simulations show that up to 81 % of the theoretical capacity doubling is achieved, limited by full‑duplex‑specific interference.

Abstract

Recent progress in establishing the capability of radios to operate in full duplex mode on a single channel has been attracting growing attention from many researchers. We extend this work by considering the application to small cells, in particular resource-managed cellular systems similar to the TDD variant of LTE. We derive conditions where full duplex operation provides improved throughput compared to half duplex for a single cell scenario. We present a hybrid scheduler that defaults to half duplex operation but can assign full duplex timeslots when it is advantageous to do so. We compare the performance of such a scheduler with a traditional half duplex scheduler in terms of throughput and energy efficiency. Our simulation results show that we achieve as much as 81% of the capacity doubling promised by full duplex, with limitations deriving from interference effects specific to full duplex operation.