Simultaneous signaling and channel estimation for in-band full-duplex communications employing adaptive spatial protection

In-band full-duplex relays are envisioned as promising solution to increase the throughput of next generation wireless communications. Full-duplex relays, being able to transmit and receive at same carrier frequency, offers increased spectral efficiency compared to half-duplex relays that transmit and receive at different frequencies or times. The practical implementation of full-duplex relays is limited by the strong self-interference caused by the coupling of relay's own transit signals to its desired received signals. Several techniques have been proposed in literature to mitigate the relay self-interference. In this thesis, the performance of in-band full-duplex multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relays is considered in the context of simultaneous communications and channel estimation. In particular, adaptive spatial transmit techniques is considered to protect the full-duplex radio's receive array. It is assumed that relay's transmit and receive antenna phase centers are physically distinct. This allows the radio to employ adaptive spatial transmit and receive processing to mitigate self-interference.

The performance of this protection is dependent upon numerous factors, including channel estimation accuracy, which is the focus of this thesis. In particular, the concentration is on estimating the self-interference channel. A novel approach of simultaneous signaling to estimate the self-interference channel in MIMO full-duplex relays is proposed. To achieve this simultaneous communications

and channel estimation, a full-rank pilot signal at a reduced relative power is transmitted simultaneously with a low rank communication waveform. The self-interference mitigation is investigated in the context of eigenvalue spread of spatial relay receive co-variance matrix. Performance is demonstrated by using simulations,

in which orthogonal-frequency division-multiplexing communications and pilot sequences are employed.