Performance Evaluation of Sub-Band Full Duplex for 5G-Advanced Small Cells

This paper presents a performance evaluation of sub-band full duplex (SBFD) for an indoor office environment. SBFD has the potential to improve packet latency by utilizing non-overlapping uplink and downlink frequency resources simultaneously. To evaluate the SBFD performance, system- level simulations are conducted with different packet sizes and varied offered load conditions. The simulation results reveal a clear dependence of SBFD performance on the packet size of the traffic model. For small packet cases, up to 55% improvement of the average packet latency in the uplink and up to 24% in the downlink is achieved in SBFD, as compared to static TDD, when a 90 dB ratio of self-interference mitigation (RSI) is ensured. For large packet cases, including an uplink-only slot in the SBFD frame structure has the potential to improve the uplink latency, even though this adjustment leads to increased downlink latency. Furthermore, simulation results indicate that the has a noticeable impact on the SBFD performance in the downlink.