Impact of Transport Control Protocol on Full Duplex Performance in 5G Networks

Full duplex (FD) communication has attracted the attention of the industry and the academia as an important feature in the design of the future 5th generation (5G) wireless communication system. Such technology allows a device to simultaneously transmit and receive in the same frequency band, with the potential of providing higher throughput and lower latency compared to traditional half duplex (HD) systems. In this paper, the interaction between Transport Control Protocol (TCP) and FD in 5G ultra-dense small cell networks is studied. TCP is a well-known transport layer protocol for providing reliability, which comes at the price of increased delay and reduced system throughput. FD is expected to accelerate the TCP congestion control mechanism and hence mitigate such consequences. System level results show that FD can outperform HD and alleviate the TCP drawbacks when the inter-cell interference is not the main limiting factor. On the other hand, under strong inter-cell interference, results show that the capabilities of the system to cope with such interference dictates the gain that FD may provide over HD.