Inter-client interference cancellation for full-duplex networks

Recent studies have experimentally shown the gains of full-duplex radios. However, due to its relatively higher cost and complexity, we can envision a more practical step in the network evolution is to have a full-duplex access point (AP) but keep the clients half-duplex. Unfortunately, the full-duplex gains can hardly be extracted in practice as the uplink transmission from a half-duplex client introduces inter-client interference to another downlink client. To address this issue, we present the design and implementation of IC2 (Inter-Client Interference Cancellation), the first physical layer solution that exploits the AP's full-duplex capability to actively cancel the interference at the downlink client. Such active cancellation not only improves the achievable capacity, but also better tolerates imperfect user pairing, simplifying the MAC design as a result. We build a prototype of IC2 on USRP-N200 and evaluate its performance via both testbed experiments and large-scale trace-driven simulations. The results show that, without IC2, about 60% of client pairs produce no gain from full-duplex transmissions, while, with IC2 the median throughput gain over conventional half-duplex networks can be 1.65× even when clients are simply paired randomly.