Idle period shortening for TDD communications in large cells

Time division duplex (TDD) technologies are necessary to deal with unpaired frequency bands and to allow low-complexity user equipments (UE) without duplexer in paired frequency bands. In TDD communications, a frame is divided into several sub-frames, each sub-frame being allocated to either uplink (UL) or downlink (DL). An idle period (IP) is required at a DL/UL switching point. It is usually dimensioned according to the cell radius and is identical for all UEs of the cell. In this paper, we propose a UE-specific IP duration, which increases the overall data rate of TDD communications for large cells. Numerical results show the potentially large benefit of the proposed dimensioning in term of spectral efficiency, which can be obtained without any specific signaling