The dramatic growth in the number of smart devices (e.g., smartphones, connected vehicles, and wearables) and the resulting exponential growth in mobile data traffic has increased the need for higher capacity wireless networks. Thus, the wireless research community is searching for technologies to use the available spectrum more efficiently. One prominent approach to increase spectral efficiency is to use more antennas on wireless devices and allow them to operate in full-duplex mode. However, as the number of antennas increases, wireless communication becomes directional, which makes it harder to support mobile devices. Full-duplex communication also increases interference, which necessitates design of new algorithms to manage interference. The goal of this project is to develop theoretical and practical methods to maintain full-duplex spectral efficiency gains in multihop topologies of mobile devices with multiple antennas. The findings from this project will be integrated into wireless networking courses across multiple universities. The project team will work closely with their industry partners to transfer the results of their research to industry. The researchers will involve both undergraduate and underrepresented populations in their research to encourage them to enter science and engineering fields.

The proposed work has three main objectives:

(i) Self-Interference Cancellation. The project team will derive new self-interference cancellation techniques to enable full-duplex in many-antenna wireless systems.

(ii) Mobility Support. The project team will design new beam tracking technologies to better support mobile users. The algorithms will be augmented with contextual awareness to reduce tracking overhead and increase users' quality of service.

(iii) Multihop Spectral Efficiency. The project team will develop joint beamforming, scheduling, and routing algorithms to manage interference and maintain full-duplex spectral efficiency gains in a network of many-antenna full-duplex nodes with single or multihop traffic flows.

Each research thrust will result in new theorems, algorithms, and protocols. These theoretical aspects will be evaluated through simulations and experimentation on programmable wireless hardware to characterize the end-to-end system benefits in a variety of real-world settings.

This project is funded by NSF grant CNS-1910517: “CNS Core: Small: Collaborative Research: Many-Antenna Full-Duplex for Mobile and Multihop Topologies”!

We are grateful to the National Science Foundation, CISE program managers, and CNS reviewers for funding our research and giving us feedback to enhance the outcomes of the project.