Energy- and Spectral- Efficiency Tradeoff in Full-Duplex Communications

This paper investigates the tradeoff between energy efficiency (EE) and spectral-efficiency (SE) for full- duplex (FD) communication enabled cellular networks. We assume that small cell base stations are working in the FD mode while user devices still work in the conventional half-duplex (HD) mode. First, a necessary condition for a FD transceiver to achieve better EE-SE tradeoff than a HD one is derived. Then, we analyze the EE-SE relation of a FD transceiver in the scenario of single pair of users and obtain a closed-form expression of the EE-SE relation. Next, we extend our result to the multi-user scenario and prove that EE is a quasi-concave function of SE in general and develop an optimal algorithm to achieve the maximum EE based on the Lagrange dual method. Our analysis is finally verified by extensive numerical results.