On the Effect of Self-Interference Cancelation in MultiHop Wireless Networks

Abstract

In a wireless network, the problem of self-interference arises when a node transmits and receives simultaneously in the same frequency band. So far only two extreme approaches to circumvent this problem were thoroughly investigated in the literature. The first one prevents any node to transmit and receive simultaneously which may lead to a too conservative design. The second one assumes perfect self-interference cancelation which can be too optimistic since it ignores all possible technological limitations. To fill this gap, we provide a method based on complementary geometric programming for evaluating the gains achievable at the network layer when the network nodes employ self-interference cancelation techniques with different degrees of accuracy. The gains are evaluated in terms of average sum rate and average network congestion by using a network utility maximization framework. The method provides insights into the behavior of different network topologies when self-interference cancellation is employed in nodes. In addition, it can be used to assess the required degrees of accuracy of the self-interference in order to achieve substantial benefits. Thus, from a network design perspective, the proposed method is very beneficial. Numerical results suggest that the benefits from self-interference cancelation are more pronounced in tandem wireless network setups in which the network nodes are located in a linear grid.