
2
focused SI cancellation method in [17].
Previous Approaches for SI Cancellation. The SI can-
cellation problem has been actively studied in FD wireless
communication systems [18]–[20] (i.e., without the additional
sensing functionality). In general, SI cancellation techniques
can be adopted in the propagation [21], analog [22]–[24],
and digital domains [25], [26]. As shown in Fig. 1, the
propagation-domain cancellation aims to minimize the cou-
pling between the transmit and receive direct paths. This kind
of cancellation is achieved by techniques based on path loss,
cross-polarization, and antenna directionality [9]. Beyond this,
the analog-domain cancellation aims to suppress SI before the
ADC, where a negative copy of the transmit waveform gen-
erated by the canceller circuit is subtracted from the received
signal [20], [22], [23], [27]. Finally, as the last defense against
SI, the digital-domain cancellation block utilizes either linear
or non-linear adaptive filters to generate the negative of the
residual SI [25], [26], and add it to the digital signal after the
ADC.
The above SI cancellation techniques for communications
rely on the uncorrelated nature between the SI (e.g., downlink
data stream) and the signal of interest (SoI) (e.g., the uplink
data stream); thus, the SI can be suppressed by adding its
negative to the received signal without impairing the SoI.
However, since the SoI in ISAC consists of uplink commu-
nications data and radar echoes that are correlated with the
SI, it is challenging to effectively suppress the SI without
distorting the radar echoes. To tackle this problem, utilizing the
time-of-arrival (ToA) difference or the spatial angle-of-arrival
(AoA) difference between the SI and echo are two promising
approaches. With respect to the first approach, the early study
[17] utilizes the temporal difference to generate a negative
counterpart of the SI signal before the ADC (cf. Fig. 1 (b)),
based on a gradient-learning method. Apart from adding this
negative counterpart, an adaptive filter is also employed to
generate a negative in digital domain to cancel the residual
SI (cf. Fig. 1 (a)). In practice, many factors (e.g., RF taps,
adaptive filter taps, and update algorithms) affect the accuracy
of the generated negatives in both domains, which in turn,
have a huge impact on the SI cancellation performance. If the
SI signal is fast-changing, this approach may fail in tracking
and can have high computational complexity.
In multi-antenna systems, an alternative way to suppress SI
in ISAC is by employing the spatial AoA difference between
the SI and SoI. In [28], the SI cancellation based on TX and
RX beamforming design is adopted in the digital domain (cf.
Fig. 1a). Specifically, the TX beamformer is the weighted sum
of two separate beams probing at a downlink communication
user and a radar target, whose power allocation is controlled
by a parameter. In terms of the RX beamformer, the null-space
projection (NSP) based on pseudoinverse operation is used to
generate nulls in the angles of the downlink communication
beam and SI. In [29] and [30], the NSP method is utilized to
design hybrid TX and RX beamformer for sensing the target
and communicating to a downlink user (cf. Figs. 1a and 1b).
However, in these studies, the TX and RX beamformers are
separately designed and only the RX beamformer is used for
TABLE I
NOVELTY COMPARISON WITH EXISTING FD ISAC LITERATURE
Our work [12] [13] [17] [28]–[30]
Relay X
Analog hardware design X
Waveform design X
Tx/Rx beamformers NSP design X
Tx/Rx beamformers joint design X X
Uplink user X X
Downlink user X X X X
Multi-antenna at users X
Radar performance X X X X X
Communication performance X X
SI cancellation. Recently, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS)
have emerged as a means to boost the SoI, and thus reduce
the effect of SI [31], [32], but this approach cannot actively
cancel SI, and induces additional hardware and beamforming
design complexity.
Thus, the potential of joint ISAC TX-RX beamformer design
at transceiver to further suppress the SI has not been explored.
In addition, the uplink communication performance in the FD
ISAC system has not been analyzed. Given that the research
on FD ISAC is still in its infancy (cf. Table I), we consider a
mono-static FD ISAC multiple input multiple output (MIMO)
system. In this system, (a) the TX-RX beamformers at the
transceiver, (b) transmit precoder at the uplink user, and (c)
receive combiner at the downlink user are jointly optimized.
The aim of the optimization is to simultaneously (a) maximize
the uplink and downlink rate, (b) maximize the transmit and
receive radar beampattern power at the target, and (c) suppress
the residual SI. Inspired by research adopting the penalty-dual
decomposition (PDD) method (e.g., for FD mmWave hybrid
beamforming [33], and IRS [34]), a penalty-based iterative
algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem. Our
proposed scheme can work when the received signal exceeds
ADC dynamic range by adopting effective SI cancellation
techniques before quantization.
Contributions and Overview of Results. In this paper, our
contributions are summarized as follows:
•We first model a FD ISAC mono-static system to capture
the echo-miss problem.
•To suppress the residual SI and preserve the two types of
SoI (e.g., radar echo and uplink data), we formulate the
joint TX-RX beamformer design problem for FD ISAC,
where the objective function incorporates (a) uplink and
downlink rates as the communications metric, (b) the
transmit and receive radar beampattern power at a target
as the sensing metric, and (c) the post-beamforming SI
residual as a penalty term. Based on the equivalence
between the rate maximization and the mean square
error (MSE) minimization [35], [36], and inspired by
the PDD method, an iterative algorithm with guaran-
teed convergence and acceptable complexity is developed
using block coordination descent (BCD) methods. As
seen in Table I, in contrast to the existing literature,
our optimization framework concentrates on joint TX-RX
beamformer design and directly cancel residual SI.