Fundamental Limits of Spectrum Sharing Full-Duplex Multicell Networks

Abstract

This paper studies the degrees of freedom (DoFs) of full-duplex (FD) multicell networks that share the spectrum among multiple cells. In the considered network, we assume that FD base stations (BSs) with multiple transmit and receive antennas communicate with multiple single-antenna uplink (UL) and downlink (DL) mobile users. By spectrum sharing among multiple cells, and with FD radio, the network can utilize the spectrum more efficiently. However, since spectrum sharing and FD induce additional inter-cell and intra-cell interferences, interference management is crucial to take advantage of these features. In this paper, we propose novel interference management strategies which take into account the new sources of interferences caused by spectrum sharing and FD to establish a general achievability result on the sum DoFs. The key ideas in our proposed scheme are to minimize the dimension of UL inter-cell and user-to-user interferences using interference alignment at the UL users. On the BS side, we propose an interference management strategy to align or null out DL intra-cell and inter-cell interferences, and BS-to-BS interferences. We further establish an upper bound on the sum DoFs and show that our lower and upper bounds match under certain conditions. Several numerical evaluations are shown which demonstrate that spectrum sharing and FD can significantly improve the throughput over conventional cellular networks, especially for a network with large number of users and/or cells.