Uplink/downlink rate analysis and impact of power allocation for full-duplex cloud-RANs

This paper considers a cloud radio access network, where full-duplex (FD) users communicate with remote radio heads (RRHs) that are spatially distributed. We consider all participate RRH association (ARA) and single nearest RRH association (SRA) policies with optimal, maximum ratio combining/maximal ratio transmission (MRT), and zero-forcing/MRT (ZF/MRT) processing schemes and derive analytical expressions useful to compare the average uplink/downlink (UL/DL) sum rate among association schemes as a function of the number of RRHs antennas and UL/DL RRH density. We also study a dense network setting with multiple FD users and derive exact expressions for the average UL/DL rates, where a user-centric clustering technique is adopted and each user is served by its nearest UL and DL RRHs. Furthermore, by maximizing the instantaneous sum rate, we develop an optimum power allocation scheme for the single-user case. We observe that ARA results in a rate region that is strongly biased toward the UL or DL, but using SRA results in a more balanced rate region. Moreover, SRA policy with ZF/MRT processing achieves up to 32% and 42% average sum rate gains as compared with the HD SRA and FD ARA counterparts, respectively.