Intra and Inter-Cell Resource Management in Full-Duplex Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Full-duplex communication is drawing high attention as a means of enhancing wireless capacity considerably by enabling simultaneous transmission and reception on the same frequency spectrum. While it had been considered infeasible for a long time due to strong self-interference, recent researches have made substantial progress on addressing this challenge. This paper focuses on designing full-duplex cellular networks with co-channel femtocells. Due to relatively high transmit power, cancellation of self-interference by existing techniques could still be imperfect for cellular systems and thus residual interference may impact performance significantly. To overcome this in OFDMA systems, a new radio resource management scheme assigning downlink and uplink transmissions jointly while considering the gain of self-interference cancellation is developed. Three available transmission modes of a frequency resource block and crossover points between their achievable capacities are identified for the mode selection of each resource block. Users are then assigned resource blocks and transmit power levels are determined such that the total utility sum is maximized. To handle new femtocell interference scenarios, the transmit powers of femtocells and their connected users are adjusted by a coordination algorithm such that both data transmission and mode selection of an underlying macrocell are protected.