Full-Duplex Millimeter-Wave Communication

TL;DR

This paper investigates full-duplex millimeter-wave communication, exploring antenna configurations, modeling self-interference channels, and proposing beamforming cancellation methods to enhance spectrum efficiency in multi-user systems.

Contribution

It introduces antenna configurations suitable for FD-mmWave, models the SI channel with spatial sparsity, and proposes beamforming cancellation techniques under constant-amplitude constraints.

Findings

Separate Tx/Rx arrays improve SI suppression flexibility.

LOS-SI channel exhibits spatial sparsity in mmWave.

FD base stations can benefit even without FD users.

Abstract

The potential of doubling the spectrum efficiency of full-duplex (FD) transmission motivates us to investigate FD millimeter-wave (FD-mmWave) communication. To realize FD transmission in the mmWave band, we first introduce possible antenna configurations for FD-mmWave transmission. It is shown that, different from the cases in micro-wave band FD communications, the configuration with separate Tx/Rx antenna arrays appears more flexible in self-interference (SI) suppression while it may increase some cost and area versus that with the same array. We then model the mmWave SI channel with separate Tx/Rx arrays, where a near-field propagation model is adopted for the line-of-sight (LOS) path, and it is found that the established LOS-SI channel with separate Tx/Rx arrays also shows spatial sparsity. Based on the SI channel, we further explore approaches to mitigate SI by signal processing, and we focus on a new cancellation approach in FD-mmWave communication, i.e., beamforming cancellation. Centered on the constant-amplitude (CA) constraint of the beamforming vectors, we propose several candidate solutions. Lastly, we consider an FD-mmWave multi-user scenario, and show that even if there are no FD users in an FD-mmWave cellular system, the FD benefit can still be exploited in the FD base station. Candidate solutions are also discussed to mitigate both SI and multi-user interference (MUI) simultaneously.