This paper presents the design and implementation of the first in-band full duplex WiFi radios that can simultaneously transmit and receive on the same channel using standard WiFi 802.11ac PHYs and achieves close to the theoretical doubling of throughput in all practical deployment scenarios. Our design uses a single antenna for simultaneous TX/RX (i.e., the same resources as a standard half duplex system). We also propose novel analog and digital cancellation techniques that cancel the self interference to the receiver noise floor, and therefore ensure that there is no degradation to the received signal. We prototype our design by building our own analog circuit boards and integrating them with a fully WiFi-PHY compatible software radio implementation. We show experimentally that our design works robustly in noisy indoor environments, and provides close to the expected theoretical doubling of throughput in practice.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2486001.2486033

Full duplex radios

In-band full-duplex (IBFD) operation has emerged as an attractive solution for increasing the throughput of wireless communication systems and networks. With IBFD, a wireless terminal is allowed to transmit and receive simultaneously in the same frequency band. This tutorial paper reviews the main concepts of IBFD wireless. One of the biggest practical impediments to IBFD operation is the presence of self-interference, i.e., the interference that the modem's transmitter causes to its own receiver. This tutorial surveys a wide range of IBFD self-interference mitigation techniques. Also discussed are numerous other research challenges and opportunities in the design and analysis of IBFD wireless systems.

/pdf/in-band-full-duplex-wireless-challenges-and-opportunities-djlyhtrciu.pdf

In-Band Full-Duplex Wireless: Challenges and Opportunities

This paper discusses the design of a single channel full-duplex wireless transceiver. The design uses a combination of RF and baseband techniques to achieve full-duplexing with minimal effect on link reliability. Experiments on real nodes show the full-duplex prototype achieves median performance that is within 8% of an ideal full-duplexing system. This paper presents Antenna Cancellation, a novel technique for self-interference cancellation. In conjunction with existing RF interference cancellation and digital baseband interference cancellation, antenna cancellation achieves the amount of self-interference cancellation required for full-duplex operation. The paper also discusses potential MAC and network gains with full-duplexing. It suggests ways in which a full-duplex system can solve some important problems with existing wireless systems including hidden terminals, loss of throughput due to congestion, and large end-to-end delays.

/pdf/achieving-single-channel-full-duplex-wireless-communication-3pg630e002.pdf

Achieving single channel, full duplex wireless communication

In-band full-duplex (IBFD) operation has emerged as an attractive solution for increasing the throughput of wireless communication systems and networks. With IBFD, a wireless terminal is allowed to transmit and receive simultaneously in the same frequency band. This tutorial paper reviews the main concepts of IBFD wireless. Because one the biggest practical impediments to IBFD operation is the presence of self-interference, i.e., the interference caused by an IBFD node's own transmissions to its desired receptions, this tutorial surveys a wide range of IBFD self-interference mitigation techniques. Also discussed are numerous other research challenges and opportunities in the design and analysis of IBFD wireless systems.

This paper presents a full duplex radio design using signal inversion and adaptive cancellation. Signal inversion uses a simple design based on a balanced/unbalanced (Balun) transformer. This new design, unlike prior work, supports wideband and high power systems. In theory, this new design has no limitation on bandwidth or power. In practice, we find that the signal inversion technique alone can cancel at least 45dB across a 40MHz bandwidth. Further, combining signal inversion cancellation with cancellation in the digital domain can reduce self-interference by up to 73dB for a 10MHz OFDM signal. This paper also presents a full duplex medium access control (MAC) design and evaluates it using a testbed of 5 prototype full duplex nodes. Full duplex reduces packet losses due to hidden terminals by up to 88%. Full duplex also mitigates unfair channel allocation in AP-based networks, increasing fairness from 0.85 to 0.98 while improving downlink throughput by 110% and uplink throughput by 15%. These experimental results show that a re- design of the wireless network stack to exploit full duplex capability can result in significant improvements in network performance.

/pdf/practical-real-time-full-duplex-wireless-48e487yqxp.pdf

Practical, real-time, full duplex wireless

Existing indoor WiFi networks in the 2.5GHz and 5 GHz use too much transmit power, needed because the high carrier frequency limits signal penetration and connectivity. Instead, we propose a novel indoor wireless mesh design paradigm, based on Low Frequency, using the newly freed white spaces previously used as analogue TV bands, and Low Power - 100 times less power than currently used. Preliminary experiments show that this maintains a similar level of connectivity and performance to existing networks. It also yields more uniform connectivity, thus simplifies MAC and routing protocol design. We also advocate full-duplex networking in a single band, which becomes possible in this setting (because we operate at low frequencies). It potentially doubles the throughput of each link and eliminates hidden terminals.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/main-47.pdf

Rethinking Indoor Wireless Mesh Design: Low Power, Low Frequency, Full-Duplex

Recent advances in PHY layer design demonstrated efficient self-interference cancellation and full-duplex in a single band. Building a MAC that exploits self-interference cancellation is a challenging task. Links can be scheduled concurrently, but only if they either (i) don't interfere or (ii) allow for self-interference cancellation. Two issues arise: Firstly, it is difficult to construct a schedule that fully exploits the potentials for self-interference cancellation for arbitrary traffic patterns. Secondly, designing an efficient and fair distributed MAC is a daunting task; the issues become even more pronounced when scheduling under the constraints. We propose ContraFlow, a novel MAC that exploits the benefits of self-interference cancellation and increases spatial reuse. We use full-duplex to eliminate hidden terminals, and we rectify decentralized coordination inefficiencies among nodes, thereby improving fairness. Using measurements and simulations we illustrate the performance gains achieved when ContraFlow is used and we obtain both a throughput increase over current systems, as well as a significant improvement in fairness.

/pdf/efficient-and-fair-mac-for-wireless-networks-with-self-1u3arlwc05.pdf

Efficient and fair MAC for wireless networks with self-interference cancellation

Full-duplex wireless communication is described. In an embodiment, a transceiver device having a transmitter circuit and a receiver circuit receives a data packet sent over a shared communication medium. In the embodiment, the transceiver reads the header of the data packet and starts transmitting an output signal on the same shared communication medium. Embodiments are described in which, whilst the transmission of the output signal is ongoing, the transceiver receives an impaired data signal which is made up of the payload of the data packet and interference from the output signal. In the embodiment, a cancellation signal is derived from the output signal, and this is combined with the impaired data signal to remove the interference and recover the payload of the data packet.

Full-duplex wireless communications

Existing indoor WiFi networks in the 2.5GHz and 5 GHz use too much transmit power, needed because the high carrier frequency limits signal penetration and connectivity. Instead, we propose a novel indoor wireless design paradigm, based on Low Frequency, using the newly freed white spaces previously used as analogue TV bands, and Low Power – 100 times less power than currently used. Preliminary experiments show that this maintains a similar level of connectivity and performance to existing networks. We also advocate full-duplex networking in a single band, which becomes possible in this setting (because we operate at low frequencies). It potentially doubles the throughput of each link and eliminates hidden terminals.

/pdf/rethinking-indoor-wireless-low-power-low-frequency-full-2kiz7caaep.pdf

Rethinking Indoor Wireless: Low Power, Low Frequency, Full-duplex

Due to the limitation of radio spectrum resource and fast growing of wireless applications, careful channel allocation is highly needed to mitigate the performance degradation of wireless networks because of interference among different users. While most of the existing works consider allocating fixed-width channels, combining contiguous channels may provide an alternative way to better utilize the available channels. In this paper, we study the problem of adaptive-width channel allocation from a game-theoretic point of view, in which the nodes are rational and always pursue their own objectives. We first model the problem as a strategic game, and show the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE), when there is no exogenous factor to influence players' behavior. We further propose a charging scheme to influence the players' behavior, by which the system is guaranteed to converge to a Dominant Strategy Equilibrium (DSE), a solution concept that gives participants much stronger incentives. We show that, when the system converges to a DSE, it also achieves global optimality, in terms of system-wide throughput without starvation. Numerical results verify that with our charging scheme, the system-wide throughput obtained is higher as compared to the throughput obtained when system is in NE.

/pdf/on-adaptive-width-channel-allocation-in-non-cooperative-3nk8j3uo2n.pdf

Nikhil Singh

Papers

Rethinking Indoor Wireless Mesh Design: Low Power, Low Frequency, Full-Duplex

Efficient and fair MAC for wireless networks with self-interference cancellation

Full-duplex wireless communications

Rethinking Indoor Wireless: Low Power, Low Frequency, Full-duplex

On adaptive-width channel allocation in non-cooperative, multi-radio wireless networks