Degrees of Freedom of Full-Duplex Multiantenna Cellular Networks

Abstract

We study the degrees of freedom (DoF) of cellular networks in which a full duplex (FD) base station (BS) equipped with multiple transmit and receive antennas communicates with multiple mobile users. We consider two different scenarios. In the first scenario, we study the case when half duplex (HD) users, partitioned to either the uplink (UL) set or the downlink (DL) set, simultaneously communicate with the FD BS. In the second scenario, we study the case when FD users simultaneously communicate UL and DL data with the FD BS. Unlike conventional HD only systems, inter-user interference (within the cell) may severely limit the DoF, and must be carefully taken into account. With the goal of providing theoretical guidelines for designing such FD systems, we completely characterize the sum DoFs for both FD cellular networks. The key idea of the proposed scheme is to carefully allocate UL and DL streams using interference alignment and beam forming techniques. By comparing the DoFs of the FD systems with those of the conventional HD systems, we show that the DoF can approach the two-fold gain over the HD systems, when the number of users becomes large enough compared with the number of antennas at the BS.