Performance analysis of multi-hop full-duplex decode-and-forward relaying

Full-duplex relaying (FDR), which can receive and transmit simultaneously over the same frequency band, enables a significant enhancement of spectral efficiency and has attracted much attention. In this paper, we investigate the performance of multi-hop decode-and-forward (DF) FDR systems, in which the relay nodes suffer not only from self-interference but also from inter-relay interference (IRI). Two cases are considered for the IRI, i.e., the mth relay only knows the channel state information (CSI) from the (m−1)th relay or knows perfect CSI from all other relays. Assuming that all the channels including the residual self-interference (RSI) and IRI are subject to Rayleigh fading, we first determine the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the end-to-end signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for each case. Then based on these results, we derive the outage probability, symbol error probability and ergodic capacity, for each case respectively. Finally, we compare the performance of multi-hop FDR with multi-hop half-duplex relaying (HDR) and validate our analysis by the simulation results.