FdICIC: Inter-cell Interference Coordination for Full-Duplex Cellular Systems

This paper investigates the inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) for heterogeneous networks (HetNets) with full-duplex (FD) small cell base stations to maximize the overall system throughput. To be compatible with the enhanced ICIC (eICIC) and the further enhanced ICIC (FeICIC) of existing LTE standards, the proposed FdICIC technique adopts cell range expansion and almost blank subframe to deal with the complicated interference scenario in such FD HetNets. In detail, the FdICIC includes four steps, namely, choosing the serving base station, pairing users for FD communication, resource block (RB) allocation, and power control of FD users. Through numerical simulation, we demonstrate that: (1) the overall system throughput can be improved by 10–25% with four FD small cell base stations when the residual self-interference is between − 130 to − 110 dB, (2) by carefully selecting the CRE bias, the overall system throughput can be further improved by about 30%, (3) the proposed user pairing, RB allocation, and power control steps have significant contributions to the performance improvement.