Full and half duplex-switching policy for cellular networks under uplink degradation constraint

Full-duplex (FD) is a principle in which a transceiver can receive and transmit on the same time-frequency radio resource. Assuming perfect self-interference cancellation (self-IC), FD can potentially double the spectral efficiency (SE) of a given point-to-point communication. However in cellular networks, we may be far from this upper bound due to base stations (BSs) and users interference. In particular, even if the overall SE is improved, the uplink (UL) performance is degraded compared to a traditional half-duplex (HD) system. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a new duplex-switching (DS) policy in which BSs can adopt FD- or HD-mode according to the position of their scheduled users. This system is analyzed using stochastic geometry in terms of average SE (ASE) and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). The proposed scheme allows to trade-off the downlink (DL) for the UL performance when comparing to a FD scenario. In terms of cell performance (UL+DL), our DS policy even outperform both HD and FD systems when the parameters are optimized.