Full-Duplex in Wireless Communication Networks

In today''s wireless networks, spectrum is getting increasingly scarce. Full-duplex, then, is one possible candidate to improve the wireless networks'' performance. When we introduce full-duplex capability into a node, it can transmit and receive at the same time and same frequency band, which sometimes we also call it ""in-band full-duplex"". In this thesis, I aim at exploiting the full-duplex capability to improve the performance of wireless communication networks. There are three different research topics in my thesis. First, I leverage the full-duplex ability on relay transmission. With full-duplex ability, relay can receive signal from source and forward signal to destination simultaneously. This property greatly enhances the efficiency of relay system compared to the half-duplex relay system, which needs to separate its operation into two phases, receiving first and then forwarding. Second, full-duplex can enable simultaneously uplink and downlink transmission. Hence, I introduce the ability into the access point (AP) in 802.11 networks. However, in such transmission, uplink client will interfere downlink client. To realize the full-duplex gain, we propose method to handle the inter-client interference. Finally, I exploit the usage of full-duplex relay to balance the asymmetric load in multi-cell networks. With full-duplex relay, a cell is possibly to help its adjacent cell''s client to achieve the load balancing.