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In this paper, we present and study a digital-controlled method, called SoftNull, to enable full-duplex in many-antenna systems. Unlike most designs that rely on analog cancelers to suppress self-interference, SoftNull relies on digital transmit beamforming to reduce self-interference. SoftNull does not attempt to perfectly null self-interference, but instead seeks to reduce self-interference sufficiently to prevent swamping the receiver's dynamic range. Residual self-interference is then cancelled digitally by the receiver. We evaluate the performance of SoftNull using measurements from a 72-element antenna array in both indoor and outdoor environments. We find that SoftNull can significantly outperform half-duplex for small cells operating in the many-antenna regime, where the number of antennas is many more than the number of users served simultaneously.

The challenge to in-band full-duplex wireless communication is managing self-interference. Many designs have employed spatial isolation mechanisms, such as shielding or multi-antenna beamforming, to isolate the self-interference wave from the receiver. Such spatial isolation methods are effective, but by confining the transmit and receive signals to a subset of the available space, the full spatial resources of the channel be under-utilized, expending a cost that may nullify the net benefit of operating in full-duplex mode. In this paper we leverage an antenna-theory-based channel model to analyze the spatial degrees of freedom available to a full-duplex capable base station, and observe that whether or not spatial isolation out-performs time-division (i.e. half-duplex) depends heavily on the geometric distribution of scatterers. Unless the angular spread of the objects that scatter to the intended users is overlapped by the spread of objects that backscatter to the base station, then spatial isolation outperforms time division, otherwise time division may be optimal.

The challenge to in-band full-duplex wireless communication is managing self-interference. Many designs have employed spatial isolation mechanisms, such as shielding or multi-antenna beamforming, to isolate the self-interference wave from the receiver. Such spatial isolation methods are effective, but by confining the transmit and receive signals to a subset of the available space, the full spatial resources of the channel be under-utilized, expending a cost that may nullify the net benefit of operating in full-duplex mode. In this paper we leverage an antenna-theory-based channel model to analyze the spatial degrees of freedom available to a full-duplex capable base station, and observe that whether or not spatial isolation out-performs time-division (i.e. half-duplex) depends heavily on the geometric distribution of scatterers. Unless the angular spread of the objects that scatter to the intended users is overlapped by the spread of objects that backscatter to the base station, then spatial isolation outperforms time division, otherwise time division may be optimal., Comment: To Appear at 2014 International Symposium on Information Theory

Recent research results have demonstrated the feasibility of full-duplex wireless communication for short-range links. Although the focus of the previous works has been active cancellation of the self-interference signal, a majority of the overall self-interference suppression is often due to passive suppression, i.e., isolation of the transmit and receive antennas. We present a measurement-based study of the capabilities and limitations of three key mechanisms for passive self-interference suppression: directional isolation, absorptive shielding, and cross-polarization. The study demonstrates that more than 70 dB of passive suppression can be achieved in certain environments, but also establishes two results on the limitations of passive suppression: (1) environmental reflections limit the amount of passive suppression that can be achieved, and (2) passive suppression, in general, increases the frequency selectivity of the residual self-interference signal. These results suggest two design implications: (1) deployments of full-duplex infrastructure nodes should minimize near-antenna reflectors, and (2) active cancellation in concatenation with passive suppression should employ higher-order filters or per-subcarrier cancellation., Comment: 16 pages, Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication, October 2013

This paper discusses transmission strategies for dealing with the problem of self-interference in multi-hop wireless networks in which the nodes communicate in a full- duplex mode. An information theoretic study of the simplest such multi-hop network: the two-hop source-relay-destination network, leads to a novel transmission strategy called structured self-interference cancellation (or just "structured cancellation" for short). In the structured cancellation strategy the source restrains from transmitting on certain signal levels, and the relay structures its transmit signal such that it can learn the residual self-interference channel, and undo the self-interference, by observing the portion of its own transmit signal that appears at the signal levels left empty by the source. It is shown that in certain nontrivial regimes, the structured cancellation strategy outperforms not only half-duplex but also full-duplex schemes in which time-orthogonal training is used for estimating the residual self-interference channel., Comment: Draft of the paper to be presented at the Allerton Conference on Sept 29, 2011; Proc. 49th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, September 2011