Optimal Scheduling and Power Control for In-Band Full-Duplex Communication in WLANs

The in-band full-duplex (IBFD) wireless communication has been spotlighted as one of the promising technologies to enhance throughput performance in the future WLANs. One way to leverage full-duplex capability in practical scenario is to enable three-node transmission, where a full-duplex access point (AP) transmits date to one half-duplex user while receives date from another half-duplex user. Such full-duplex communication mode, however, introduces extra uplink-downlink interference, which may degrade the full-duplex gain. In this paper, with the target of fully achieving the performance improvement brought by the full-duplex transmission, we investigate the joint optimization of scheduling and power control in three-node full-duplex WLANs. Specifically, the problem formulation is to maximize the aggregate utility of downlink users under specific date rate constraints of uplink users. In particular, the optimization is conducted by jointly considering the transmit powers of the AP and uplink users, the access-intensity of uplink users, and the uplink-downlink user paring. Such an optimization problem is a classical mixed integer nonlinear programming problem (MINLP) and generally NP-hard. To solve it, we develop an efficient iterative algorithm based on alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA). Numerical results verify that the proposed scheme achieves higher utility compared to other existing schemes.