Digitally-Assisted RF-Analog Self Interference Cancellation for Wideband Full-Duplex Radios

The ever-increasing demand for more data from users is pushing the development of alternative wireless technologies to improve upon network capacity. Full-Duplex radios provide an exciting opportunity to theoretically double the available spectral efficiency of wireless networks by simultaneously transmitting and receiving signals in the same frequency band. The main challenge that is presented in the implementation of a full-duplex radio is the high power transmitter leaking to the sensitive receiver chain and masking the desired receive signal to be decoded. This transmitter leakage is referred to as self interference and it is required that this self interference signal be cancelled below the receiver noise floor to achieve the full benefits of a full-duplex radio. Cancellation of the self interference signal is realized through several techniques, categorized as passive suppression, digital cancellation, and analog cancellation. These methods all have their challenges in achieving the full amount of cancellation necessary and therefore all three techniques are typically employed in the system. In this thesis, a novel digitally assisted radio frequency (RF) analog self interference canceller is proposed to suppress the self interference signal before the receiver chain for wide modulation bandwidth signals. This canceller augments minimum complexity RF-analog interference cancellation hardware that uses an RF vector multiplier in combination with a flexible digital rational function finite impulse response filter. The simple topology reduces the number of impairments added to the system through the analog components and identifies the parameters of the proposed filter in a deterministic and single iteration algorithm. The hardware proof-of-concept prototype is built using off-the-shelf RF-analog components and demonstrates excellent cancellation performance. Using four TX test signals with modulation bandwidths of 20~MHz, 40~MHz, 80~MHz, and 120~MHz, the self interference canceller achieves a minimum of 50~dB, 47~dB, 42~dB, and 40~dB of cancellation respectively. This thesis reviews the previously proposed self interference cancellation topologies, system non-idealities that provide challenges for full-duplex implementation, and the realization of the proposed RF-analog self interference canceller

Adaptive Nonlinear RF Cancellation for Improved Isolation in Simultaneous Transmit-Receive Systems

This paper proposes an active radio frequency (RF) cancellation solution to suppress the transmitter (TX) passband leakage signal in radio transceivers supporting simultaneous transmission and reception. The proposed technique is based on creating an opposite-phase baseband equivalent replica of the TX leakage signal in the transceiver digital front-end through adaptive nonlinear filtering of the known transmit data, to facilitate highly accurate cancellation under a nonlinear TX power amplifier (PA). The active RF cancellation is then accomplished by employing an auxiliary transmitter chain, to generate the actual RF cancellation signal, and combining it with the received signal at the receiver (RX) low noise amplifier (LNA) input. A closed-loop parameter learning approach, based on the decorrelation principle, is also developed to efficiently estimate the coefficients of the nonlinear cancellation filter in the presence of a nonlinear TX PA with memory, finite passive isolation, and a nonlinear RX LNA. The performance of the proposed cancellation technique is evaluated through comprehensive RF measurements adopting commercial LTE-Advanced transceiver hardware components. The results show that the proposed technique can provide an additional suppression of up to 54 dB for the TX passband leakage signal at the RX LNA input, even at considerably high transmit power levels and with wide transmission bandwidths. Such novel cancellation solution can therefore substantially improve the TX-RX isolation, hence reducing the requirements on passive isolation and RF component linearity, as well as increasing the efficiency and flexibility of the RF spectrum use in the emerging 5G radio networks.Comment: accepted to IEE

A Passive STAR Microwave Circuit for 1-3 GHz Self-Interference Cancellation

Simultaneous transmit and receive (STAR) allows full-duplex operation of a radio, which leads to doubled capacity for a given bandwidth. A circulator with high-isolation between transmit and receive ports, and low-loss from the antenna to receive port is typically required for achieving STAR. Conventional circulators do not offer wideband performance. Although wideband circulators have been proposed using parametric, switched delay-line/capacitor, and N-path filter techniques using custom integrated circuits, these magnet-free devices have non-linearity, noise, aliasing, and switching noise injection issues. In this paper, a STAR front-end based on passive linear microwave circuit is proposed. Here, a dummy antenna located inside a miniature RF-silent absorption chamber allows circulator-free STAR using simple COTS components. The proposed approach is highly-linear, free from noise, does not require switching or parametric modulation circuits, and has virtually unlimited bandwidth only set by the performance of COTS passive microwave components. The trade-off is relatively large size of the miniature RF-shielded chamber, making this suitable for base-station side applications. Preliminary results show the measured performance of Tx/Rx isolation between 25-60 dB in the 1.0-3.0 GHz range, and 50-60 dB for the 2.4-2.7 GHz range.Comment: 4 figures, 4 page

Techniques for Achieving High Isolation in RF Domain for Simultaneous Transmit and Receive

With the growth of wireless data traffic, additional spectrum is required to meet consumer demands. Consequently, innovative approaches are needed for efficient management of the available limited spectrum. To double the achievable spectral efficiency, a transceiver can be designed to receive and transmit signals simultaneously (STAR) across the same frequency band. However, due to the coupling of the high power transmitted signal into the collocated receiver, the receiver\u27s performance is degraded. For successful STAR realization, the coupled high-power transmit (Tx) signal should be suppressed by 100-120 dB over the entire operational bandwidth. So far, most STAR implementations are narrowband, and not useful for ultra wideband (UWB) communications. In this paper, we present a review of novel approaches employed to achieve improved cancellation across wide bandwidths in RF and propagation domains. Both single and multi-antenna systems are considered. Measurements show an average cancellation of 50 dB using two stages of RF signal cancellation

Self-interference cancellation enabling high-throughput short-reach wireless full-duplex communication

In-band full-duplex (FD) wireless communication allows the simultaneous transmission and reception of data at the same frequency band, effectively doubling the spectral efficiency and data rate while reducing the latency. Previously published designs mostly target the self-interference (SI) cancellation in conventional wireless systems. In this paper, we focus on real-time SI cancellation for short-reach wireless FD systems. The superior signal quality of a point-to-point short-reach wireless system, allows the utilization of wideband communications to achieve a high throughput. Besides, in such wireless systems, the impacts of phase noise and nonlinear distortions are largely reduced, easing the SI cancellation. Moreover, the degradation of signal reception quality due to FD operation is experimentally evaluated in different environments. Experimental results of a prototype implementation show that a combination of antenna isolation and digital cancellation can already achieve an overall SI cancellation performance of 72.5 dB over a bandwidth of 123 MHz. This prototype can support a high-data-rate FD communication link of close to 1 Gbps up to 300 cm with an error vector magnitude lower than -26 dB in a typical indoor environment

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

High Performance Local Oscillator Design for Next Generation Wireless Communication

Local Oscillator (LO) is an essential building block in modern wireless radios. In modern wireless radios, LO often serves as a reference of the carrier signal to modulate or demod- ulate the outgoing or incoming data. The LO signal should be a clean and stable source, such that the frequency or timing information of the carrier reference can be well-defined. However, as radio architecture evolves, the importance of LO path design has become much more important than before. Of late, many radio architecture innovations have exploited sophisticated LO generation schemes to meet the ever-increasing demands of wireless radio performances. The focus of this thesis is to address challenges in the LO path design for next-generation high performance wireless radios. These challenges include (1) Congested spectrum at low radio frequency (RF) below 5GHz (2) Continuing miniaturization of integrated wireless radio, and (3) Fiber-fast (>10Gb/s) mm-wave wireless communication. The thesis begins with a brief introduction of the aforementioned challenges followed by a discussion of the opportunities projected to overcome these challenges. To address the challenge of congested spectrum at frequency below 5GHz, novel ra- dio architectures such as cognitive radio, software-defined radio, and full-duplex radio have drawn significant research interest. Cognitive radio is a radio architecture that opportunisti- cally utilize the unused spectrum in an environment to maximize spectrum usage efficiency. Energy-efficient spectrum sensing is the key to implementing cognitive radio. To enable energy-efficient spectrum sensing, a fast-hopping frequency synthesizer is an essential build- ing block to swiftly sweep the carrier frequency of the radio across the available spectrum. Chapter 2 of this thesis further highlights the challenges and trade-offs of the current LO gen- eration scheme for possible use in sweeping LO-based spectrum analysis. It follows by intro- duction of the proposed fast-hopping LO architecture, its implementation and measurement results of the validated prototype. Chapter 3 proposes an embedded phase-shifting LO-path design for wideband RF self-interference cancellation for full-duplex radio. It demonstrates a synergistic design between the LO path and signal to perform self-interference cancellation. To address the challenge of continuing miniaturization of integrated wireless radio, ring oscillator-based frequency synthesizer is an attractive candidate due to its compactness. Chapter 4 discussed the difficulty associated with implementing a Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) with ultra-small form-factor. It further proposes the concept sub-sampling PLL with time- based loop filter to address these challenges. A 65nm CMOS prototype and its measurement result are presented for validation of the concept. In shifting from RF to mm-wave frequencies, the performance of wireless communication links is boosted by significant bandwidth and data-rate expansion. However, the demand for data-rate improvement is out-pacing the innovation of radio architectures. A >10Gb/s mm-wave wireless communication at 60GHz is required by emerging applications such as virtual-reality (VR) headsets, inter-rack data transmission at data center, and Ultra-High- Definition (UHD) TV home entertainment systems. Channel-bonding is considered to be a promising technique for achieving >10Gb/s wireless communication at 60GHz. Chapter 5 discusses the fundamental radio implementation challenges associated with channel-bonding for 60GHz wireless communication and the pros and cons of prior arts that attempted to address these challenges. It is followed by a discussion of the proposed 60GHz channel- bonding receiver, which utilizes only a single PLL and enables both contiguous and non- contiguous channel-bonding schemes. Finally, Chapter 6 presents the conclusion of this thesis