Throughput Improvement in Cellular Networks via Full-Duplex Based Device-to-Device Communications

In this paper, throughput improvement of device-to-device (D2D)-aided underlaying cellular networks is analyzed. The D2D devices are assumed to be capable of operating at the full duplex (FD) mode to enable the concurrent transmission and reception with a single frequency band. We analyze the impact of activating D2D users on the throughput of FD-based D2D (FD-D2D) aided underlaying network by considering non-ideal self-interference cancellation at the FD devices. Despite of an extra interference imposed on the cellular users (CUs) by the active D2D links, which may Erode the signal-to-interference ratio of the former significantly, the FD-D2D mode is still shown to exhibit its superiority in terms of the throughput improvement. Furthermore, in order to avoid a severe FD-D2D-induced interference imposed on the CUs, a new mechanism called 'dynamic cellular link protection (DCLP),' which prohibits the transmissions of FD-D2D users when they are located inside the pre-set guard areas, is proposed. Numerical results show that the proposed DCLP mechanism is capable of substantially improving the throughput of the underlaying cellular networks without seriously eroding the capacity of the conventional cellular links.