Increased demand for higher spectrum efficiency, especially in the space-limited chip, base station, and vehicle environments, has spawned the development of full-duplex communications, which enable the transmitting and receiving to occur simultaneously at the same frequency. The key challenge in this full-duplex communication paradigm is to reduce the self-interference as much as possible, ideally, down to the noise floor. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the self-interference cancellation (SIC) techniques for co-located communication systems from a circuits and fields perspective. The self-interference occurs when the transmitting antenna and the receiving antenna are co-located, which significantly degrade the system performance of the receiver, in terms of the receiver desensitization, signal masking, or even damage of hardwares. By introducing the SIC techniques, the self-interference can be suppressed and the weak desired signal from the remote transmitter can be recovered. This, therefore, enables the full-duplex communications to come into the picture. The SIC techniques are classified into two main categories: the traditional circuit-domain SICs and the novel field-domain SICs, according to the method of how to rebuild and subtract the self-interference signal. In this review paper, the field-domain SIC method is systematically summarized for the first time, including the theoretical analysis and the application remarks. Some typical SIC approaches are presented and the future works are outlooked.
Self-Interference Cancellation: A Comprehensive Review from Circuits and Fields Perspectives
