In-band full duplex wireless communications and networking for IoT devices: Progress, challenges and opportunities

Abstract

The new era of IoT devices call for wireless communications with high spectral efficiency because of the congested spectral space in reality. Current wireless communication systems work at half duplex mode in an either time-division or frequency-division approach to transmit and receive wireless signals. Half duplex results in poor spectral efficiency because only unidirectional communications are allowed. Recent research has aimed at enabling In-band full duplex wireless communication that allows a wireless node for simultaneous transmission and reception of signals. The benefits of in-band full duplex includes the doubled spectra efficiency which is in great need in the rapidly growing IoT devices and the potentials to solve the hidden terminals, unfairness and the exposed problems presented in the current single channel half duplex wireless communications. This paper investigates the research background and progress of in-band full duplex wireless. It also presents the research problems as well as opportunities. In addition, this paper summarizes the performance of literature solutions with experiment results in achieving in-band full duplex wireless communications. It also compares the Throughput and Packet Reception Ratio performance of full duplex to that of half duplex from a Software Defined Radio platform.