Hybrid full and half duplex networking

Abstract

Full-duplex (FD) technique is expected to double the spectral efficiency. Yet the performance gain of the FD network over half-duplex network is limited by severe inter-cell interference and depends on the uplink and downlink traffic load. In this paper, we propose to employ hybrid full and half duplex (HFHD) network to mitigate the strong interference and adapt to the traffic variation. We first introduce the notion of FD reuse factor, borrowing the idea of frequency reuse factor from traditional cellular networks to alleviate inter-cell interference. Then, we provide a joint uplink and downlink power control policy to balance the uplink and downlink throughput by further controlling the interference among base stations. Considering the time-varying and location-dependent traffic load in practical networks, we present a dynamic round-robin strategy to allocate FD subframes efficiently to further improve throughput. Simulation results show that the HFHD network can provide remarkable gain in the overall uplink and downlink throughput over the half duplex network, and can improve the fairness among uplink and downlink transmission with respect to the FD network.