Digital Self-Interference Cancellation for Full-Duplex Underwater Acoustic Systems

Underwater acoustic (UWA) communication suffers from the limited available bandwidth for data transmission. Full-duplex (FD) communication has demonstrated the ability of achieving high spectral efficiency in terrestrial radio communications. There is a significant potential in adopting the benefits of FD in UWA systems. The major obstacle in FD communications is the severe self-interference (SI) introduced by the near-end transmitted signal. For FD UWA communications, the low signal frequency allows high-resolution analogue-to-digital converter (ADCs) to be used. With higher performance ADCs, it might be possible to achieve higher digital SI cancellation performance than that in FD radio systems. In this brief, we present experimental results of digital SI cancellation in FD UWA system, based on the use of the low-complexity recursive least-squares (RLS) adaptive filter with dichotomous coordinate descent iterations. The experimental results demonstrate that up to 46 dB of SI is cancelled when we use the transmitted digital data as the regressor in the adaptive filter. To improve the SI cancellation performance without introducing high-complexity operation, we use the digitalized power amplifier (PA) output as the regressor to deal with the non-linear distortions caused by the PA in the transmitted chain. With this technique, as high a level as 69 dB of digital SI cancellation is achieved.