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

Virtual full-duplex multiple-input multiple-output relaying in the presence of inter-relay interference

Driven by the increasing demand for wireless broadband, low latency and power-efficient networks, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) full-duplex relaying (FDR) schemes have gained much attention in recent years. However, the performance of FDR schemes is impaired by sophisticated self-interference suppression techniques. As such, MIMO virtual FDR (VFDR) schemes have been considered as practical alternatives to recover spectral efficiency loss in half-duplex relays (HDR) without the need for sophisticated self-interference suppression algorithms. Successive relaying (SR) scheme is one of the VFDR techniques which uses a pair of HD relays that alternate between reception and retransmission of the source information to the destination. The performance of the SR based VFDR scheme is affected by inter-relay interference (IRI) due to the concurrent transmission of the source and relay nodes. The interference in VFDR schemes is conventionally treated as a degrading factor on the information decoding receivers resulting in the design of several interference avoidance and cancellation techniques. On the contrary, this thesis developed several VFDR schemes which exploit the interference to achieve performance improvement. In this study, interference management techniques, transmit/receive beamforming matrices, power allocation and joint optimisation algorithms were developed. First, a reliable MIMO VFDR scheme in the presence of IRI was designed, where the IRI was exploited for reliability improvements. The results showed significant reliability improvement over the existing schemes. Second, a joint power allocation for MIMO VFDR schemes under network power constraint was developed. The power allocation problem in the presence of IRI was formulated based on primal-dual algorithm. The results showed that the joint optimisation algorithm can efficiently utilise the network power when compared with the conventional approach. Third, simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in MIMO VFDR system was proposed, where the transmit beamforming matrices which optimise the achievable rate and harvested energy at the relays were jointly designed. The results showed that the interference energy can be harnessed to improve the SWIPT system throughput. Finally, a joint optimisation of the power split and relay position in SWIPT MIMO VFDR network were investigated. Results showed that the joint optimisation of the power split and distance factors can greatly improve the system outage performance. The analytical and numerical results in the research showed that IRI can be exploited to improve the throughput, reliability and energy harvesting of a wireless communication system. The results also showed a minimum achievable rate improvement of 80% over the HDR schemes and a reliability of 100% over the FDR schemes

Study on Generalized Buffer-State-Based Relay Selection in Cooperative Cognitive Radio Networks

学位の種別: 修士University of Tokyo(東京大学