Capacity Analysis for Full Duplex Self-Backhauled Small Cells

Full duplex (FD) communication enables simultaneous transmission and reception on the same frequency band. Although it has the potential of doubling the throughput on isolated links, in reality higher interference and asymmetric traffic demands in the uplink and downlink could significantly reduce the gains of FD operations. In this paper, we consider the application of FD operation in self-backhauled small cells, where multiple FD capable small cell base stations (SBS) are wirelessly backhauled by a FD capable macro-cell BS (MBS). To increase the capacity of the backhaul link, the MBS is equipped with multiple antennas to enable space division multiple access (SDMA). A scheduling method using the back-pressure algorithm and geometric programming is proposed for link selection and interference mitigation. Simulation results show that with FD SDMA backhaul links, the proposed scheduler almost doubles throughput even under asymmetric traffic demand and varied network conditions.