Interference mitigation and traffic adaptation in full-duplex small cell networks

Recent achievement in self-interference cancellation algorithms enables potential application of full-duplex (FD) in 5G radio access systems. FD communication promises to double the spectral efficiency by enabling the same time-frequency uplink and downlink transmissions. Yet for cellular access network with FD small cell base stations (BS) serving multiple user equipment (UE), additional BS-to-BS and UE-to-UE interference due to FD operation could diminish the performance gain if not tackled properly. Existing works all strive to achieve close to 2× FD gain at network scale, in this paper, we demonstrate that much higher FD gain (≫ 2×) can be achieved under realistic nonfull buffer traffic due to significant latency reduction. We develop practical interference mitigation strategies such as adaptive power control, joint scheduling and inter-cell interference coordination to cope with the newly introduced interference in FD cellular systems. We validate the flexible traffic adaption of FD system under bursty traffic model by our LTE-based system level simulator, where significant FD gain of upto 13v in mean throughput and 19× in cell-edge throughput can be achieved under different traffic loads over an existing LTE half-duplex system.