Enabling Full Duplex ISAC Leveraging Waveform Domain Separability

Abstract: Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in monostatic in-band full-duplex (IBFD) systems encounters significant challenges due to self-interference (SI) at the radar receiver during concurrent communication and radar operations. This paper proposes a novel waveform-domain self-interference cancellation (SIC) technique that leverages the unique properties of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) signals. The proposed approach designs the integrated dual-functionality frame to utilize OFDM for communication and AFDM for radar sensing, both generated using the same modulator block. Then, we establish the conditions under which a wide sense stationary (WSS) process in the time domain appears as WSS in the affine domain and demonstrate that the interfering OFDM signal behaves as an additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) in this domain. Exploiting this property, the received signal is projected into the affine domain, where the SI appears as AWGN, enabling its subtraction with minimal residual interference. To further mitigate the residual SI, an iterative low-complexity windowing scheme is applied, selectively locking onto the radar signal to reduce the processed signal space. A subsequent time-domain spreading step is applied after converting the SIC-processed signal into the post-coded time domain, wherein the SI diminishes separately across the delay and Doppler axes. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in terms of detection probability, target range and velocity root mean square error (RMSE), while maintaining high spectral efficiency and minimal computational complexity.