  Full duplex (FD) communications, which increases spectral efficiency through
simultaneous transmission and reception on the same frequency band, is a
promising technology to meet the demand of next generation wireless networks.
In this paper, we consider the application of such FD communication to
self-backhauled small cells. We consider a FD capable small cell base station
(BS) being wirelessly backhauled by a FD capable macro-cell BS. FD
communication enables simultaneous backhaul and access transmissions at small
cell BSs, which reduces the need to orthogonalize allocated spectrum between
access and backhaul. However, in such simultaneous operations, all the links
experience higher interference, which significantly suppresses the gains of FD
operations. We propose an interference-aware scheduling method to maximize the
FD gain across multiple UEs in both uplink and downlink directions, while
maintaining a level of fairness between all UEs. It jointly schedules the
appropriate links and traffic based on the back-pressure algorithm, and
allocates appropriate transmission powers to the scheduled links using
Geometric Programming. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheduler
nearly doubles the throughput of small cells compared to traditional
half-duplex self-backhauling.
