Impact of Full Duplex Scheduling on End-to-End Throughput in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

There have been some rapid advances on the design of full duplex (FD) transceivers in recent years. Although the benefits of FD have been studied for single-hop wireless communications, its potential on throughput performance in a multi-hop wireless network remains unclear. As for multi-hop networks, a fundamental problem is to compute the achievable end-to-end throughput for one or multiple communication sessions. The goal of this paper is to offer some fundamental understanding on end-to-end throughput performance limits of FD in a multi-hop wireless network. We show that through a rigorous mathematical formulation, we can cast the multi-hop throughput performance problem into a formal optimization problem. Through numerical results, we show that in many cases, the end-to-end session throughput in a FD network can exceed 2x of that in a half duplex (HD) network. Our finding can be explained by the much larger design space for scheduling that is offered by removing HD constraints in throughput maximization problem. The results in this paper offer some new understandings on the potential benefits of FD for end-to-end session throughput in a multi-hop wireless network.