Harvesting Full-Duplex Rate Gains in Cellular Networks with Half-Duplex User Terminals

TL;DR

This paper introduces a stochastic geometry framework for 3-node topology in cellular networks, enabling half-duplex user terminals to achieve near full-duplex rate gains with base stations, through pulse-shaping and channel overlap techniques.

Contribution

It presents a tractable mathematical model for 3-node topology in cellular networks and proposes a design paradigm to maximize rate gains using pulse-shaping and partial overlap.

Findings

3NT achieves close performance to FD networks with minimal rate loss.

3NT outperforms 2NT when SIC is inefficient.

FD base stations alone can harvest full-duplex rate gains.

Abstract

Full-Duplex (FD) transceivers may be expensive in terms of complexity, power consumption, and price to be implemented in all user terminals. Therefore, techniques to exploit in-band full-duplex communication with FD base stations (BSs) and half-duplex (HD) users' equipment (UEs) are required. In this context, 3-node topology (3NT) has been recently proposed for FD BSs to reuse the uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) channels with HD terminals within the same cell. In this paper, we present a tractable mathematical framework, based on stochastic geometry, for 3NT in cellular networks. To this end, we propose a design paradigm via pulse-shaping and partial overlap between UL and DL channels to maximize the harvested rate gains in 3NT. The results show that 3NT achieves a close performance to networks with FD BSs and FD UEs, denoted by 2-node topology (2NT) networks. A maximum of 5$\%$ rate loss is reported when 3NT is compared to 2NT with efficient self-interference cancellation (SIC). If the SIC in 2NT is not efficient, 3NT highly outperforms 2NT. Consequently, we conclude that, irrespective to the UE duplexing scheme, it is sufficient to have FD BSs to harvest FD rate gains.