Almost as good as single-hop full-duplex: bidirectional end-to-end known interference cancellation

There is growing interest in new physical-layer transmission methods based on known-interference cancellation (KIC). These KIC-based methods share the common idea that the interference can be cancelled when the bit-sequence of it is known, which can improve the efficiency of wireless data communications. Existing work on KIC mainly focuses on single-hop or two-hop networks, with physical-layer network coding (PNC) and full-duplex (FD) communications as typical examples. This paper extends the idea of KIC to multi-hop networks, and proposes a bidirectional end-to-end KIC (BE2E-KIC) transmission method for the scenario where two nodes intend to exchange packets through multiple intermediate nodes. With BE2E-KIC, the involved nodes can simultaneously transmit and receive on the same channel. We first discuss the procedure of BE2E-KIC and provide a theoretical analysis on its feasibility and effectiveness. Then, we propose a medium access control (MAC) scheme that supports BE2E-KIC, which schedules packet transmissions in more realistic cases with the presence of packet-loss. Simulation results illustrate that BE2E-KIC can improve the network throughput and reduce the end-to-end delay compared with other existing transmission methods.