Half-duplex and full-duplex interference mitigation in relays assisted heterogeneous network

Abstract

In a multicell environment, the half-duplex (HD) relaying is prone to inter-relay interference (IRI) and the full-duplex (FD) relaying is prone to relay residual-interference (RSI) and relay-to-destination interference (RDI) due to Next Generation Node B (gNB) traffic adaptation to different backhaul subframe configurations. IRI and RDI occur in the downlink when a relay is transmitting on its access link and interfering with the reception of a backhaul link of another victim relay. While the simultaneous transmission and reception of the FD relay creates the RSI. IRI, RDI, and RSI have detrimental effects on the system performance, leading to lower ergodic capacity and higher outage probability. Some previous contributions only briefly analysed the IRI, RSI, and RDI in a single cell scenario and some assumed that the backhaul and access subframes among the adjacent cells are perfectly aligned for different relays without counting for IRI, RSI and RDI. However, in practise the subframes are not perfectly aligned. In this paper, we eliminate the IRI, RSI, and RDI by using the hybrid zeroforcing and singular value decomposition (ZF-SVD) beamforming technique based on nullspace projection. Furthermore, joint power allocation (joint PA) for the relays and destinations is performed to optimize the capacity. The ergodic capacity and outage probability comparisons of the proposed scheme with comparable baseline schemes corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.