Uplink and Downlink Performance Bounds for Full Duplex Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the uplink and downlink performance bounds of full duplex cellular networks, highlighting the trade-offs and potential improvements with dense low-power base station deployment.

Contribution

It introduces a realistic network model using Matern Cluster Process and provides analytical bounds for FD performance, emphasizing the uplink-downlink trade-off.

Findings

FD improves downlink performance

FD severely degrades uplink performance

Dense low-power base stations can enhance FD system performance

Abstract

With Full Duplex (FD), wireless terminal is capable of transmitting and receiving data simultaneously in the same frequency resources, however, it introduces self interference and co-channel interference. Even though various signal processing techniques are emerged to cancel the self interference, the bottleneck for FD performance in cellular systems is the co-channel interference from the other uplink and downlink signals. In this work we have studied both the uplink and downlink performances of a FD cellular network, where users employ fractional power control in uplink. We use Matern Cluster Process to model the network, which provides a tractable and realistic model to characterize the user-base station distances which are needed for uplink power control. Based on the obtained coverage probabilities, rates and their robust approximations, we show that while FD improves downlink performance, it severely hurts the uplink performance. Also, we provide a trade-off between uplink and downlink performances. Our study suggests dense deployment of low power base stations can improve the performance of FD system.