A Digital Self-Interference Cancellation Scheme for In-Band Full-Duplex-Applied 5G System and Its Software-Defined Radio Implementation

The development of mobile communication technology toward 6G is difficult because the required spectrum resources have already been allocated to existing systems. Therefore, new communication systems must have high spectral efficiency to effectively utilize the available resources. This article proposes a digital self-interference (SI) canceller that can be applied to full-duplex cellular systems based on the current 5G signal format (5G-FDC) to introduce in-band full-duplex systems beyond 5G. Specifically, we reorganize the 5G demodulation reference signal (DMRS) and define a novel DMRS configuration, in which the DMRSs for uplink and downlink communications do not interfere with each other. The proposed DMRS configuration effectively improves the accuracy of the SI channel estimation. Moreover, we propose a channel extrapolation scheme that suppresses the channel estimation degradation, which deteriorates the block error rate performance. Additionally, we propose a noise estimation method to improve the low-density parity check decoding performance of the desired signal in 5G-FDC systems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through computer simulations and experimentally by using our developed and implemented software-defined radio-based 5G-FDC prototype. Digital SI cancellation performances of 50 dB and 30.6 dB are observed in the simulation and experimental evaluations, respectively.