Achievable Transmission Rates and Self-Interference Channel Estimation in Hybrid Full-Duplex/Half-Duplex MIMO Relaying

This paper investigates the achievable throughput of a multi-antenna two-hop relay link under hybrid full/half-duplex operation. The analysis is facilitated by realistic waveform simulations, which explicitly model all the essential circuit impairments occurring in the relay transceiver together with degrading channel estimation and self-interference cancellation. The obtained results indicate that pure full-duplex operation does not ensure optimal performance but additional half-duplex transmission periods are usually needed to maximize the end-to-end throughput. Especially, it is shown that the estimation of the self-interference channel within the relay should be performed when the source is not transmitting anything while also the source should be allowed to transmit alone to avoid making the first hop a bottleneck. These findings form a solid basis for optimizing the full-duplex MIMO relay deployments in future mobile networks.