Resource Allocation of Multi-Cell Full-Duplex Networks Based on Ant Colony Optimization

Full-duplex (FD) communication enables a device to transmit and receive at the same time and on the same frequency. It has the potential to double the capacity of the half-duplex (HD) system. In a multiuser system, however, FD could also double the interference between users which hinders improvement of the capacity. In this paper, we consider resource allocation in a FD multi-cell system to mitigate the interference and exploit the potential gain of FD communication. Due to high complexity of the problem, an ant colony optimization (ACO) based algorithm is proposed to obtain a good performance with reasonable complexity. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first real multi-cell ACO in the literature applied to a system that allows FD and HD switching. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms an existing greedy search method when the number of resource blocks becomes large and the optimization problem becomes complex. By combining the advantages of the ACO algorithm and greedy search, the resultant algorithm yields an even better performance.