Suboptimal radio resource management for full-duplex enabled small cells

This paper addresses the radio resource allocation problem for full-duplex (FD) wireless systems in small multi-cell system, assuming FD base stations and half-duplex (HD) user equipments (UEs). Due to the self-interference and inter-user interference, the problem is coupled between uplink and downlink channels, and can be formulated as joint uplink and downlink sum-rate maximization. As the problem is non-convex, a distributed joint resource and power allocation method based on iterative approach is presented. The proposed algorithm assigns resource blocks for FD operation when it provides spectral gain by pairing UEs with appropriate power levels to mitigate the mutual interference, but otherwise defaults to HD operation. Simulation results reveal that during FD transmission, intracell interference is the dominant performance limiting factor even in high intercell interference scenario. Furthermore, the results suggest that despite the strong interferences, the FD system with the proposed algorithm achieves significant spectral efficiency gains comparing to HD system.