Patent ID: 8542617

Claim:
A method of switching duplex operation in a wireless network, said wireless network comprising a plurality of networking devices, said method comprising: operating said network in a first duplexing mode; detecting a trigger event within at least one of said plurality of networking devices operating in said first duplexing mode; determining a second duplexing mode of operation based at least in part on the detection of said trigger event; distributing information about said change from said first duplexing mode to said second duplexing mode to at least a portion of said plurality of networking devices; and operating said network in the second duplexing mode; wherein said first and second duplexing modes describe one or more radio resources allocated for a number of uplink, downlink and guard subframes; and where the first duplexing mode comprises a full-duplex frequency division duplexing (FDD) mode, the second duplexing mode comprises a half-duplex FDD mode and the trigger event comprises a falling timing advance (TA) value, wherein the falling TA value corresponds to a length of time a user equipment (UE) has to advance its timing of uplink (UL) transmission and is sent by an eNodeB to the UE according to a perceived propagation delay of UL transmissions, wherein the falling TA value comprises a decreased value relative to a previous TA value and is used to compare with a threshold in order to decide whether to change the first duplexing mode to the second duplexing mode.