Hardware Implementation of Neural Self-Interference Cancellation

In-band full-duplex systems can transmit and receive information simultaneously and on the same frequency band. However, due to the strong self-interference caused by the transmitter to its own receiver, the use of non-linear digital self-interference cancellation is essential. In this work, we describe a hardware architecture for a neural network-based non-linear self-interference (SI) canceller and we compare it with our own hardware implementation of a conventional polynomial based SI canceller. Our results show that, for the same SI cancellation performance, the neural network canceller has an <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$8.1\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> smaller area and requires <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$7.7\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> less power than the polynomial canceller. Moreover, the neural network canceller can achieve 7 dB more SI cancellation while still being <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.2\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> smaller than the polynomial canceller and only requiring <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.3\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> more power. These results show that NN-based methods applied to communications are not only useful from a performance perspective, but can also lead to order-of-magnitude implementation complexity reductions.