Virtual Full Duplex via Joint Selection of Transmission Point and DL/UL Configuration

In this paper, a virtual full duplex scheme is proposed by considering the joint selection of transmission point (TP) and downlink/uplink (DL/UL) configuration. Specifically, in a heterogenous network (HetNet), consisting of multiple macro TPs (MTPs) and small TPs (STPs) connected to the same virtual base station (BS) pool, the UEs in the coverage of the same small cell can be served by an MTP and an STP simultaneously with different DL and UL settings. Moreover, the interference from the DL transmission to the UL reception can be canceled via successive interference cancellation since the DL data and the corresponding scheduling information are well known at virtual BS pool. The analysis and system-level simulation results demonstrate that the highest DL and UL spectral efficiency is achieved by the scheme that MTP and STP serve UEs in DL and UL, respectively, at the same time.