Exploring the potential for full-duplex in legacy LTE systems

With the growing demand for increased spectral efficiencies, there has been renewed interest in enabling full-duplex communications. However, existing approaches to enable full-duplex require a clean-slate approach to address the key challenge in full-duplex, namely self-interference suppression. This serves as a big deterrent to enabling full-duplex in existing cellular networks. Towards our vision of enabling full-duplex in legacy cellular, specifically LTE networks, with no modifications to existing hardware at BS and client as well as technology specific industry standards, we present the design of our experimental system FD-LTE, that incorporates a combination of passive SI cancellation schemes, with legacy LTE half-duplex BS and client devices. We build a prototype of FD-LTE, integrate it with LTE's evolved packet core and conduct over-the-air experiments to explore the feasibility and potential for full-duplex with legacy LTE networks. We report promising experimental results from FD-LTE, which currently applies to scenarios with limited ranges that is typical of small cells.