Degrees of freedom of cellular networks: Gain from full-duplex operation at a base station

In this paper, we study the degrees of freedom (DoF) of cellular networks in which a base station with full-duplex operation simultaneously communicates to multiple half-duplex mobile stations. The half-duplex mobile stations are assumed to either communicate with the base station in the uplink or downlink. For such networks, inter-terminal interference needs to be taken into account to achieve the potential gain that doubles the throughput of conventional half-duplex cellular networks. We provide an achievable total DoF for such networks and show that having full-duplex operation at the base station only can indeed double the DoF when the number of mobile stations is sufficiently greater than the number of antennas at the base station. The key idea is to utilize the full DoF for the uplink transmission, while minimizing the inter-terminal interference via interference alignment. The downlink communication rate is then carefully chosen to occupy the remaining DoF at the receiving mobile stations.