Millimeter Wave Full-Duplex Radios: New Challenges and Techniques

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential and challenges of implementing full-duplex communication in millimeter wave systems, highlighting new techniques that leverage dense antenna arrays for simultaneous transmission and reception.

Contribution

It identifies key challenges and proposes solutions using spatial degrees of freedom to enable mmWave full-duplex operation beyond traditional self-interference cancellation.

Findings

Full-duplex mmWave can improve spectral efficiency and latency.

Dense antenna arrays enable in-band simultaneous transmission and reception.

Challenges include interference management and hardware implementation.

Abstract

Equipping millimeter wave (mmWave) systems with full-duplex capability would accelerate and transform next-generation wireless applications and forge a path for new ones. Full-duplex mmWave transceivers could capitalize on the already attractive features of mmWave communication by supplying spectral efficiency gains and latency improvements while also affording future networks with deployment solutions in the form of interference management and wireless backhaul. Foreseeable challenges and obstacles in making mmWave full-duplex a reality are presented in this article along with noteworthy unknowns warranting further investigation. With these novelties of mmWave full-duplex in mind, we lay out potential solutions---beyond active self-interference cancellation---that harness the spatial degrees of freedom bestowed by dense antenna arrays to enable simultaneous transmission and reception in-band.