Full-duplex (FD) wireless communication refers to a communication system in which both ends of a wireless link transmit and receive data simultaneously and on the same frequency band. One of the major challenges of FD communication is self-interference (SI), which refers to the interference caused by transmitting elements of a radio to its own receiving elements. Fully digital beamforming is a technique used to conduct beamforming and has been recently repurposed to also reduce SI. However, the cost of fully digital systems (e.g., base stations) dramatically increases with the increase in the number of antennas as these systems use a separate Tx-Rx RF chain for each antenna element. Hybrid beamforming systems use a much smaller number of RF chains to feed the same number of antennas, and hence can significantly reduce the deployment cost. In this paper, we aim to quantify the performance gap between these two radio architectures in terms of SI cancellation and system capacity in FD multi-user MIMO setups. We first obtained over-the-air channel measurement data on two outdoor massive MIMO deployments over the course of three months. We next study two state-of-the-art transmit beamforming based FD systems for fully digital and hybrid architectures. We show that the hybrid beamforming system can achieve 80-97% of the fully digital system capacity, depending on the number of clients.
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An Experiment-Based Comparison between Fully Digital and Hybrid Beamforming Radio Architectures for Many-Antenna Full-Duplex Wireless Communication
Full-duplex (FD) communication in many-antenna base stations (BSs) is hampered by self-interference (SI). This is because a FD node’s transmitting signal generates significant interference to its own receiver. Recent works have shown that it is possible to reduce/eliminate this SI in fully digital many-antenna systems, e.g., through transmit beamforming by using some spatial degrees of freedom to reduce SI instead of increasing the beamforming gain. On a parallel front, hybrid beamforming has recently emerged as a radio architecture that uses multiple antennas per FR chain. This can significantly reduce the cost of the end device (e.g., BS) but may also reduce the capacity or SI reduction gains of a fully digital radio system. This is because a fully digital radio architecture can change both the amplitude and phase of the wireless signal and send different data streams from each antenna element. Our goal in this paper is to quantify the performance gap between these two radio architectures in terms of SI cancellation and system capacity, particularly in multi-user MIMO setups. To do so, we experimentally compare the performance of a state-of-the-art fully digital many antenna FD solution to a hybrid beamforming architecture and compare the corresponding performance metrics leveraging a fully programmable many-antenna testbed and collecting over-the-air wireless channel data. We show that SI cancellation through beam design on a hybrid beamforming radio architecture can achieve capacity within 16% of that of a fully digital architecture. The performance gap further shrinks with a higher number of quantization bits in the hybrid beamforming system.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10315825
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Electronics
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2079-9292
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11010059
