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

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the impact of in-band full-duplex communications on cellular networks, revealing a trade-off between uplink and downlink performance, and proposes an adjustable partial overlap scheme to optimize spectrum use.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical framework for FD cellular networks considering uplink power control and proposes the alpha-duplex scheme for optimized partial band overlap.

Findings

FD improves downlink throughput but degrades uplink performance.

The alpha-duplex scheme allows tuning the overlap for optimal spectrum efficiency.

Analytical model accounts for spatial interference and power control in FD networks.

Abstract

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.