Full-duplex in 5G Small Cell Access: SystemDesign and Performance Aspects

TL;DR

This paper explores the design and performance of full-duplex technology in 5G small cell networks, demonstrating significant throughput and latency improvements through system optimization and interference mitigation.

Contribution

It introduces practical system design strategies and algorithms for implementing full-duplex in 5G small cells, addressing interference challenges and evaluating network performance.

Findings

FD achieves 1.9x throughput gain

FD reduces transmission latency by 5-8x

Proposed methods effectively mitigate interference

Abstract

Recent achievement in self-interference cancellation algorithms enables potential application of full-duplex (FD) in 5G radio access systems. The exponential growth of data traffic in 5G can be supported by having more spectrum and higher spectral efficiency. FD communication promises to double the spectral efficiency by enabling simultaneous uplink and downlink transmissions in the same frequency band. Yet for cellular access network with FD base stations (BS) serving multiple users (UE), additional BS-to-BS and UE-to-UE interferences due to FD operation could diminish the performance gain if not tackled properly. In this article, we address the practical system design aspects to exploit FD gain at network scale. We propose efficient reference signal design, low-overhead channel state information feedback and signalling mechanisms to enable FD operation, and develop low-complexity power control and scheduling algorithms to effectively mitigate new interference introduced by FD operation. We extensively evaluate FD network-wide performance in various deployment scenarios and traffic environment with detailed LTE PHY/MAC modelling. We demonstrate that FD can achieve not only appreciable throughput gains (1.9x), but also significant transmission latency reduction~(5-8x) compared with the half-duplex system.