Joint user scheduling and channel allocation for cellular networks with full duplex base stations

Abstract

Full‐duplex communication (FDC) can potentially double the network capacity by allowing a device to transmit and receive simultaneously on the same frequency band. In this study, a novel resource allocation and user scheduling algorithm is proposed to maximise the network throughput for a cellular network with full‐duplex (FD) base stations (BSs). The authors consider that FDC is utilised at the BS with imperfect self‐interference (SI) cancellation while user devices only work in the traditional half‐duplex (HD) way. In addition, to potentially cancel co‐channel interference caused by other users, the opportunistic interference cancellation (OIC) technique is applied at user side. Since FDC does not always perform better than HD due to residual SI (RSI), a joint mode selection, user scheduling, and channel allocation problem is formulated to maximise the system throughput. The optimisation problem is non‐convex and NP‐hard, thereby a suboptimal heuristic algorithm with low computational complexity is proposed. Numerical results demonstrate that user diversity gain, FD gain, and OIC gain can be achieved by the proposed algorithm, respectively. The performance of FDC depends on the intensity of RSI and the distribution of user devices.