Full duplex MIMO radios

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of the first in-band full duplex WiFi-PHY based MIMO radios that practically achieve the theoretical doubling of throughput. Our design solves two fundamental challenges associated with MIMO full duplex: complexity and performance. Our design achieves full duplex with a cancellation design whose complexity scales almost linearly with the number of antennas, this complexity is close to the optimal possible. Further we also design novel digital estimation and cancellation algorithms that eliminate almost all interference and achieves the same performance as a single antenna full duplex SISO system, which is again the best possible performance. We prototype our design by building our own analog circuit boards and integrating them with a WiFi-PHY compatible standard WARP 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.