Full Duplex Communication under Traffic Constraints for 5G Small Cells

Full duplex (FD) communication promise of doubling the throughput of half duplex (HD) communication makes such type of system an attractive solution to cope with the expected mobile data traffic increase. Nevertheless, simultaneous transmission and reception in dense deployment scenarios increases the inter- cell interference compared to a traditional HD communication, due to a larger number of nodes simultaneously transmitting. Moreover, FD communication can only be exploited when there is traffic in both uplink and downlink directions simultaneously. In this paper, FD communication is studied within the framework of 5th generation (5G) small cell systems in order to address its effective gain in such specific scenarios. The factors that affect FD performance are analysed, and its performance is evaluated against a traditional HD communication. System level simulations show that the gain of FD over HD in the considered scenarios is lower than the expected 100% gain, with a strong dependency on the traffic and the interference conditions.