Closed-form capacity bounds for downlink and uplink decoupling

Abstract

Downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) decoupling (DUDe) is a new architectural paradigm where DL and UL are not constrained to be associated to the same base station (BS). Thus, a user having access to multiple BSs within a dense cellular network can receive the DL traffic from one BS and send its UL traffic through another. Building upon this architectural paradigm, the present paper provides tight analytical bounds in closed form for the UL ergodic capacity that depend solely on the density of the infrastructure. The devised bounds account for the backbone network congestion and the synchronization of the acknowledgments of the decoupled channels. The proposed bounds are compared against extensive numerical simulations demonstrating the tractability and accuracy of the expressions.