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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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Doubling Down on Wireless Capacity: A Review of Integrated Circuits, Systems, and Networks for Full Duplex
| The relentless demand for data in our society has driven the continuous evolution of wireless technologies to enhance network capacity. While current deployments of 5G have made strides in this direction using massive multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) and millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands, all existing wireless systems operate in a half-duplex (HD) mode. Full-duplex (FD) wireless communication, on the other hand, enables simultaneous transmission and reception (STAR) of signals at the same frequency, offering advantages such as enhanced spectrum efficiency, improved data rates, and reduced latency. This article presents a comprehensive review of FD wireless systems, with a focus on hardware design, implementation, cross-layered considerations, and applications. The major bottleneck in achieving FD communication is the presence of self-interference (SI) signals from the transmitter (TX) to the receiver, and achieving SI cancellation (SIC) with real-time adaption is critical for FD deployment. The review starts by establishing a system-level understanding of FD wireless systems, followed by a review of the architectures of antenna interfaces and integrated RF and baseband (BB) SI cancellers, which show promise in enabling low-cost, small-form-factor, portable FD systems. We then discuss digital cancellation techniques, including digital signal processing (DSP)- and learning-based algorithms. The challenges presented by FD phased-array and MIMO systems are discussed, followed by system-level aspects, including optimization algorithms, opportunities in the higher layers of the networking protocol stack, and testbed integration. Finally, the relevance of FD systems in applications such as next-generation (xG
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- PAR ID:
- 10565020
- Publisher / Repository:
- Proceedings of the IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the IEEE
- Volume:
- 112
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0018-9219
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 405 to 432
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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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.more » « less
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Compared with traditional half-duplex wireless systems, the application of emerging full-duplex (FD) technology can potentially double the system capacity theoretically. However, conventional techniques for suppressing self-interference (SI) adopted in FD systems require exceedingly high power consumption and expensive hardware. In this paper, we consider employing an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in the proximity of an FD base station (BS) to mitigate SI for simultaneously receiving data from uplink users and transmitting information to downlink users. The objective considered is to maximize the system weighted sum-rate by jointly optimizing the IRS phase shifts, the BS transmit beamformers, and the transmit power of the uplink users. To visualize the role of the IRS in SI cancellation, we first study a simple scenario with one downlink user and one uplink user. To address the formulated non-convex problem, a low-complexity algorithm based on successive convex approximation is proposed. For the more general case considering multiple downlink and uplink users, an efficient alternating optimization algorithm based on element-wise optimization is proposed. Numerical results demonstrate that the FD system with the proposed schemes can achieve a larger gain over the half-duplex system, and the IRS is able to achieve a balance between suppressing SI and providing beamforming gain.more » « less
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Full-duplex (FD) wireless is an emerging wireless communication paradigm where the transmitter and the receiver operate simultaneously at the same frequency. One major challenge in realizing FD wireless is the interference of the TX signal saturating the receiver, commonly referred to self-interference (SI). Traditionally, self-interference cancellation (SIC) is achieved in the antenna, RF/analog, and digital domains. In the antenna domain, SIC can be achieved using a pair of separate TX and RX antennas, or using a single antenna shared by the TX and RX through a magnetic circulator, which is usually bulky, expensive, and not integrable with CMOS. Recent advances, however, have shown the feasibility of realizing high-performance non-reciprocal circulators in CMOS based on spatio-temporal modulation. In this work, we demonstrate a high power handling FD radio using a USRP SDR which employs SIC (i) at the antenna interface using a watt-level power-handling CMOS integrated, magnetic-free circulator, (ii) in the RF domain using a compact RF canceler, and (iii) in the digital domain. Our prototyped FD radio achieves +95 dB overall SIC at +15dBm TX power level. We analyze the effects of the circulator TX-RX non-linearity on the total achievable SICmore » « less
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Full-duplex (FD) wireless is an emerging wireless communication paradigm where the transmitter and the receiver operate simultaneously at the same frequency. One major challenge in realizing FD wireless is the interference of the TX signal saturating the receiver, commonly referred to self-interference (SI). Traditionally, self-interference cancellation (SIC) is achieved in the antenna, RF/analog, and digital domains. In the antenna domain, SIC can be achieved using a pair of separate TX and RX antennas, or using a single antenna shared by the TX and RX through a magnetic circulator, which is usually bulky, expensive, and not integrable with CMOS. Recent advances, however, have shown the feasibility of realizing high-performance non-reciprocal circulators in CMOS based on spatio-temporal modulation. In this work, we demonstrate a high power handling FD radio using a USRP SDR which employs SIC (i) at the antenna interface using a watt-level power-handling CMOS integrated, magnetic-free circulator, (ii) in the RF domain using a compact RF canceler, and (iii) in the digital domain. Our prototyped FD radio achieves +95 dB overall SIC at +15dBm TX power level. We analyze the effects of the circulator TX-RX non-linearity on the total achievable SIC.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/JPROC.2024.3438755
