The benefits from simultaneous transmission and reception in wireless networks

In a wireless network, the problem of self interference arises whenever a node transmits and receives simultaneously in the same frequency band. So far only two extreme approaches to circumvent this problem were thoroughly investigated in the literature. The first one prevents any node to transmit and receive simultaneously which may lead to a too conservative design. The second one assumes perfect self interference cancelation which can be too optimistic since it ignores all possible technological limitations. To fill this gap, we provide a method to evaluate the network layer benefits from simultaneous transmission and reception when the network nodes employ self interference cancelation techniques with different degrees of accuracy. From a network design perspective, the provided method can be used to find the required level of accuracy for the self interference cancelation such that certain gains are achieved at the network layer. Numerical results suggest that the accuracy of existing self interference cancelation techniques can provide significant gains for certain network setups.