Frequency-Domain RF Self-Interference Cancellation for In-Band Full-Duplex Communications

Abstract

Wireless backhaul has recently gained a significant amount of interest as a cost-effective solution in comparison with conventional backhaul technologies with dedicated microwave links or fiber optics. Self-interference cancellation (SIC) is an enabling technology that allows wireless backhaul to operate in the more spectrum-efficient in-band full-duplex (IBFD) operation mode instead of the out-of-band mode. Compared to Wi-Fi IBFD transceivers, wireless in-band backhaul systems face some unique challenges, such as significantly higher transmission power and much larger propagation delay spread for the self-interference signal, especially in the low-frequency bands under 1 GHz, which often prevent accurate SIC performance. The SIC is often implemented with an interference-cancelling filter, where the filter weights are essentially the channel estimates of the self-interference signals. In this paper, a frequency-domain Radio Frequency (RF) SIC (RF-SIC) framework with a novel filter weight optimization algorithm is proposed to tackle the challenges of wireless in-band backhaul. The proposed RF-SIC does not require a dedicated training phase which needs to stop the transmission of the backhaul signal. Moreover, it has the capability of tracking the self-interference channel variation since the filter weights are updated in a block-by-block fashion.