Full-Duplex Bidirectional MIMO: Achievable Rates Under Limited Dynamic Range

In this paper, we consider the problem of full-duplex bidirectional communication between a pair of modems, each with multiple transmit and receive antennas. The principal difficulty in implementing such a system is that, due to the close proximity of each modem´s transmit antennas to its receive antennas, each modem´s outgoing signal can exceed the dynamic range of its input circuitry, making it difficult-if not impossible-to recover the desired incoming signal. To address these challenges, we consider systems that use pilot-aided channel estimates to perform transmit beamforming, receive beamforming, and interference cancellation. Modeling transmitter/receiver dynamic-range limitations explicitly, we derive tight upper and lower bounds on the achievable sum-rate, and propose a transmission scheme based on maximization of the lower bound, which requires us to (numerically) solve a nonconvex optimization problem. In addition, we derive an analytic approximation to the achievable sum-rate, and show, numerically, that it is quite accurate. We then study the behavior of the sum-rate as a function of signal-to-noise ratio, interference-to-noise ratio, transmitter/receiver dynamic range, number of antennas, and training length, using optimized half-duplex signaling as a baseline.