Integrated Self-Interference Cancellation for Full-Duplex and Frequency-Division Duplexing Wireless Communication Systems

Abstract

From wirelessly connected robots to car-to-car communications, and to smart cities, almost every aspect of our lives will benefit from future wireless communications. While promise an exciting future world, next-generation wireless communications impose requirements on the data rate, spectral efficiency, and latency (among others) that are higher than those for today's systems by several orders of magnitude. Full-duplex wireless, an emergent wireless communications paradigm, breaks the long-held assumption that it is impossible for a wireless device to transmit and receive simultaneously at the same frequency, and has the potential to immediately double network capacity at the physical (PHY) layer and offers many other benefits (such as reduced latency) at the higher layers. Recently, discrete-component-based demonstrations have established the feasibility of full-duplex wireless. However, the realization of integrated full duplex radios, compact radios that can fit into smartphones, is fraught with fundamental challenges. In addition, to unleash the full potential of full-duplex communication, a careful redesign of the PHY layer and the medium access control (MAC) layer using a cross-layer approach is required. The biggest challenge associated with full duplex wireless is the tremendous amount of transmitter self-interference right on top of the desired signal. In this dissertation, new self-interference-cancellation approaches at both system and circuit levels are presented, contributing towards the realization of full-duplex radios using integrated circuit technology. Specifically, these new approaches involve elimination of the noise and distortion of the cancellation circuitry, enhancing the integrated cancellation bandwidth, and performing joint radio frequency, analog, and digital cancellation to achieve cancellation with nearly one part-per-billion accuracy. In collaboration with researchers at higher layers of the stack, a cross-layer approach has been used in our full-duplex research and has allowed us to derive power allocation algorithms and to characterize rate-gain improvements for full-duplex wireless networks. To enable experimental characterization of full-duplex MAC layer algorithms, a cross-layered software-defined full-duplex radio testbed has been developed. In collaboration with researchers from the field of micro-electro-mechanical systems, we demonstrate a multi-band frequency-division duplexing system using a cavity-filter-based tunable duplexer and our integrated widely-tunable self-interference-cancelling receiver