Binary power control for full-duplex networks

Abstract

Full-duplex (FD) communications benefit from recent breakthroughs in analog and digital signal processing and demonstrate nearly doubled spectrum efficiency for point-to-point links with beyond 100 dB self-interference cancellation capability. However, FD cellular networks with base stations (BSs) in FD mode and user terminals (UEs) in half-duplex mode also introduce intra-cell inter-UE interference and other kinds of interference, which might even eat up the potential gain. In this paper, we propose to take advantage of power control and inter-UE interference cancellation (IC) techniques to cope with the bothersome intra-cell inter-UE interference. We verify that the power control solution for single-cell FD network with a given user pair exhibits an interesting binary feature, that is, either both the BS and the uplink UE transmit at the maximum power or one of them completely mutes to achieve the optimal sum rate. Moreover, the binary feature holds even when inter-UE IC is applied, thus showing appealing computational efficiency. We also demonstrate significant performance improvement by applying binary power control with inter-UE IC to both singlecell and multi-cell FD networks.