Full-duplex wireless communications: challenges, solutions and future research directions

The family of conventional half-duplex (HD) wireless systems relied on transmitting and receiving in different time-slots or frequency sub-bands. Hence the wireless research community aspires to conceive full-duplex (FD) operation for supporting concurrent transmission and reception in a single time/frequency channel, which would improve the attainable spectral efficiency by a factor of two. The main challenge encountered in implementing an FD wireless device is the large power difference between the self-interference (SI) imposed by the device’s own transmissions and the signal of interest received from a remote source. In this survey, we present a comprehensive list of the potential FD techniques and highlight their pros and cons. We classify the SI cancellation techniques into three categories, namely passive suppression, analog cancellation and digital cancellation, with the advantages and disadvantages of each technique compared. Specifically, we analyse the main impairments (e.g. phase noise, power amplifier nonlinearity as well as in-phase and quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalance, etc.) that degrading the SI cancellation. We then discuss the FD based Media Access Control (MAC)-layer protocol design for the sake of addressing some of the critical issues, such as the problem of hidden terminals, the resultant end-to-end delay and the high packet loss ratio (PLR) due to network congestion. After elaborating on a variety of physical/MAC-layer techniques, we discuss potential solutions conceived for meeting the challenges imposed by the aforementioned techniques. Furthermore, we also discuss a range of critical issues related to the implementation, performance enhancement and optimization of FD systems, including important topics such as hybrid FD/HD scheme, optimal relay selection and optimal power allocation, etc. Finally, a variety of new directions and open problems associated with FD technology are pointed out. Our hope is that this treatise will stimulate future research efforts in the emerging field of FD communication

Hardware Impairments Aware Transceiver Design for Full-Duplex Amplify-and-Forward MIMO Relaying

In this work we study the behavior of a full-duplex (FD) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relay with multiple antennas, where hardware impairments of the FD relay transceiver is taken into account. Due to the inter-dependency of the transmit relay power on each antenna and the residual self-interference in an FD-AF relay, we observe a distortion loop that degrades the system performance when the relay dynamic range is not high. In this regard, we analyze the relay function in presence of the hardware inaccuracies and an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the signal to distortion-plus-noise ratio (SDNR), under relay and source transmit power constraints. Due to the problem complexity, we propose a gradient-projection-based (GP) algorithm to obtain an optimal solution. Moreover, a nonalternating sub-optimal solution is proposed by assuming a rank-1 relay amplification matrix, and separating the design of the relay process into multiple stages (MuStR1). The proposed MuStR1 method is then enhanced by introducing an alternating update over the optimization variables, denoted as AltMuStR1 algorithm. It is observed that compared to GP, (Alt)MuStR1 algorithms significantly reduce the required computational complexity at the expense of a slight performance degradation. Finally, the proposed methods are evaluated under various system conditions, and compared with the methods available in the current literature. In particular, it is observed that as the hardware impairments increase, or for a system with a high transmit power, the impact of applying a distortion-aware design is significant.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

MSE based transceiver designs for bi-directional full-duplex MIMO systems

We consider a multiple antenna full-duplex (FD) bidirectional (point-to-point) communication system with a limited analog domain self-interference cancellation capability. The effect of the residual self-interference resulting from independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) channel estimation errors and limited dynamic ranges of the transmitters and receivers is studied in the digital domain. We design transceiver matrices based on the minimization of sum mean-squared error (MSE) and the maximum per-node MSE optimization problems subject to individual power constraints at each node through an iterative alternating algorithm, which is proven to converge to at least a local optimal solution

Achievable rates of full-duplex MIMO radios in fast fading channels with imperfect channel estimation

We study the theoretical performance of two full-duplex multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio systems: a full-duplex bi-directional communication system and a full-duplex relay system. We focus on the effect of a (digitally manageable) residual self-interference due to imperfect channel estimation (with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian channel estimation error) and transmitter noise. We assume that the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is not available the transmitters. To maximize the system ergodic mutual information, which is a non-convex function of power allocation vectors at the nodes, a gradient projection algorithm is developed to optimize the power allocation vectors. This algorithm exploits both spatial and temporal freedoms of the source covariance matrices of the MIMO links between transmitters and receivers to achieve higher sum ergodic mutual information. It is observed through simulations that the full-duplex mode is optimal when the nominal self-interference is low, and the half-duplex mode is optimal when the nominal self-interference is high. In addition to an exact closed-form ergodic mutual information expression, we introduce a much simpler asymptotic closed-form ergodic mutual information expression, which in turn simplifies the computation of the power allocation vectors

Full-Duplex Wireless for 6G: Progress Brings New Opportunities and Challenges

The use of in-band full-duplex (FD) enables nodes to simultaneously transmit and receive on the same frequency band, which challenges the traditional assumption in wireless network design. The full-duplex capability enhances spectral efficiency and decreases latency, which are two key drivers pushing the performance expectations of next-generation mobile networks. In less than ten years, in-band FD has advanced from being demonstrated in research labs to being implemented in standards and products, presenting new opportunities to utilize its foundational concepts. Some of the most significant opportunities include using FD to enable wireless networks to sense the physical environment, integrate sensing and communication applications, develop integrated access and backhaul solutions, and work with smart signal propagation environments powered by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. However, these new opportunities also come with new challenges for large-scale commercial deployment of FD technology, such as managing self-interference, combating cross-link interference in multi-cell networks, and coexistence of dynamic time division duplex, subband FD and FD networks.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures, accepted to an IEEE Journa

Advanced DSP Algorithms For Modern Wireless Communication Transceivers

A higher network throughput, a minimized delay and reliable communications are some of many goals that wireless communication standards, such as the fifthgeneration (5G) standard and beyond, intend to guarantee for its customers. Hence, many key innovations are currently being proposed and investigated by researchers in the academic and industry circles to fulfill these goals. This dissertation investigates some of the proposed techniques that aim at increasing the spectral efficiency, enhancing the energy efficiency, and enabling low latency wireless communications systems. The contributions lay in the evaluation of the performance of several proposed receiver architectures as well as proposing novel digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms to enhance the performance of radio transceivers. Particularly, the effects of several radio frequency (RF) impairments on the functionality of a new class of wireless transceivers, the full-duplex transceivers, are thoroughly investigated. These transceivers are then designed to operate in a relaying scenario, where relay selection and beamforming are applied in a relaying network to increase its spectral efficiency. The dissertation then investigates the use of greedy algorithms in recovering orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals by using sparse equalizers, which carry out the equalization in a more efficient manner when the low-complexity single tap OFDM equalizer can no longer recover the received signal due to severe interferences. The proposed sparse equalizers are shown to perform close to conventional optimal and dense equalizers when the OFDM signals are impaired by interferences caused by the insertion of an insufficient cyclic prefix and RF impairments