Performance Analysis of Full Duplex in Cellular Systems

In band full duplex communication has been proposed as a technique in 5G to increase spectral efficiency. Traditionally full duplex wireless communication has been considered very challenging due to large self-interference that is generated. However in recent years researchers have begun to challenge this assumption with breakthroughs in self-interference cancellation (SIC). Most work on full duplex up to this point has been focused on point to point communication links and relatively little work has looked into the system level challenges. One of the largest unanswered questions about full duplex is whether it is a viable technology for access in future cellular networks. The main concern with deploying full duplex is how the additional interference will affect the system performance. In this paper, SIC will be modeled and link level simulations will be presented showing that full duplex only slightly degrades the uplink frame error rate performance of a full duplex capable eNB. These results will then be used to determine an appropriate link to system mapping for full duplex. From there multiple cellular system deployment scenarios will be investigated and the feasibility of full duplex will be explored. It will be shown that for Indoor Hotspot (InH) deployment scenario 20 percent sum throughput gain can be achieved with full duplex capability. For the outdoor scenarios full duplex can grant up to 20 percent gains and 3 percent gains for the Urban Micro (UMi) and Urban Macro (UMa) deployment scenarios respectively depending upon the amount of sectorization used. Based on these initial results and some of the assumptions used it will be concluded that full duplex is challenging for outdoor access and may only be viable for indoor scenarios and other use cases (e.g. backhaul, unlicensed spectrum).