Radio resource allocation for D2D-assisted full-duplex cellular networks

With the growing popularity of mobile devices (e.g., smart phones and tablet computers) and mobile apps (e.g., Line and WhatsApp), the volume of mobile data traffic increases tremendously. How to efficiently utilize the precious and scarce spectrum resource is a key problem for the next-generation wireless network, and full-duplex radio (FD) and device-to-device communication (D2D) provide insights into solving the problem. FD enables data transmission and reception on the same frequency band at the same time, while D2D can help relay data via unlicensed band. In this paper, we study the single cell spectrum resource allocation problem for distributed full-duplex cellular network, consisting of FD-enabled base station (BS) and some half-duplex (HD) user equipments (UEs). The objective of this paper is set to satisfy as many UEs as possible with limited spectrum resource. To achieve this goal, we propose a two-stage approach, making use of the FD and D2D techniques. The scheduler of the FD-enabled BS allocates wireless subchannels to each pair of uplink and downlink HD UEs, then D2D data offloading is to help dealing the inter-node interference by replacing FD cellular links causing serve interfere with D2D links. Algorithms for proper channel assignment for FD cellular networks and the selection of D2D offloading candidates are presented. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated by extensive simulations.