Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces to Achieve the Full-Duplex Wireless Communication

Abstract

The full-duplex (FD) radio-frequency wireless communication theoretically doubles the data rates compared to the half-duplex counterpart. However, its performance depends critically on the self-interference (SI) that exists between transmit and receive antennas. The intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) which consist of several reflecting elements (known as meta-atoms) are used to engineer the wireless environment and thus to achieve improved performance through constructively focussing the reflected signal. In this letter, the IRS technology is explored for lowering down the effect of SI in an FD wireless communication system. The utility of IRSs in FD technology is investigated in terms of outage and error probabilities. Specifically, the closed-form expressions for outage and average symbol error probabilities are obtained. All the channel coefficients are assumed to be distributed as the generalized Nakagami-m random variables. The analytical results are corroborated through Monte-Carlo simulations.