Sensing and Mitigation of Multi-Scatterer Self-Interference for Full-Duplex MIMO Communications

Abstract: This paper proposes the joint use of digital self-interference cancellation (DSIC) and spatial suppression to mitigate far-field self-interference (SI) in full-duplex multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Far-field SI, caused by echoes from environmental scatterers, is modeled based on the scatterers' angle and delay parameters, stored in a scatterer map. For each scatterer, the most suitable action regarding communication is selected from transmit beamforming, receive beamforming, DSIC, and no-action. This selection is based on simple metrics that show the expected uplink and downlink communication performance. In addition, emerging scatterers that deteriorate the communication are detected, and their delay and angles are acquired, providing an up-to-date scatterer map and presenting a \emph{sensing for communication} case. The proposed selection policy is compared with the individual implementations of DSIC and spatial suppression, highlighting the failure cases for each. It is shown that the proposed policy stays unaffected in these problematic cases and achieves SI-free performance.