Achievable rate of full-duplex massive MIMO relaying with hardware impairments

This paper studies the massive MIMO full-duplex relaying (FDR), where multiple source-destination pairs communicate simultaneously with the help of a common full-duplex relay equipped with very large antenna arrays. In contrast to the conventional MIMO system, massive MIMO must be built with low-cost components which are prone to hardware impairments. In this paper, the effect of hardware impairments is taken into consideration, and is modeled using transmit and receive distortion noises. The end-to-end achievable rates of the massive MIMO full-duplex relaying are analyzed. The scaling behaviors of echo interference, multi-user interference (MUI) and effective distortions caused by hardware impairments are obtained. The results show that the achievable rate of massive MIMO FDR is limited by the hardware impairments at the sources and destinations, instead of that at the relay or other interferences, as the number of relay antenna grows very large.