Low Complexity Full Duplex MIMO: Novel Analog Cancellation Architectures and Transceiver Design

Abstract: Incorporating full duplex operation in Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems provides the potential of boosting throughput performance. However, the hardware complexity of the analog self-interference canceller in emerging full duplex MIMO designs mostly scales with the number of transmit and receive antennas, thus exploiting the benefits of analog cancellation becomes impractical for full duplex MIMO transceivers, even for moderate number of antennas. In this paper, we present two novel architectures for the analog canceller comprising of reduced number of cancellation elements, compared to the state of the art, and simple multiplexers for efficient signal routing among the transmit and receive radio frequency chains. One architecture is based on analog taps (tap refers to a line of fixed delay, variable phase shifter, and attenuator) and the other on AUXiliary (AUX) Transmitters (TXs) that locally generate the cancellation signal. In contrast to the available analog cancellation architectures, the values for each tap or each AUX TX and the configuration of the multiplexers are jointly designed with the digital transmit and receive beamforming filters according to certain performance objectives. Focusing on a narrowband flat fading channel model as an example, we present a general optimization framework for the joint design of analog self-interference cancellation and digital beamforming. We also detail the sum rate optimization objective together with its derived solution for the latter architectural components. Representative computer simulation results demonstrate the superiority both in terms of hardware complexity and achievable performance of the proposed low complexity full duplex MIMO schemes over the lately available ones.