Full-Duplex Small Cells for Next Generation Heterogeneous Cellular Networks: A Case Study of Outage and Rate Coverage Analysis

Full-duplex (FD) technology is currently under consideration for adoption in a range of legacy communications standards due to its attractive features. On the other hand, cellular networks are becoming increasingly heterogeneous as operators deploy a mix of macrocells and small cells. With growing tendency toward network densification, small cells are expected to play a key role in realizing the envisioned capacity objectives of emerging 5G cellular networks. From a practical perspective, small cells provide an ideal platform for deploying FD technology in cellular networks due to its lower transmit power and lower cost for implementation compared with the macrocell counterpart. Motivated by these developments, in this paper, we analyze a two-tier heterogeneous cellular network, wherein the first tier comprises half-duplex macrobase stations and the second tier consists of the FD small cells. Through a stochastic geometry approach, we characterize and derive the closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the rate coverage. Our analysis explicitly accounts for the spatial density, the self-interference cancellation capabilities, and the interference coordination based on enhanced inter-cell interference coordination techniques. Performance evaluation investigates the impact of different parameters on the outage probability and the rate coverage in various scenarios.