Hybrid Interference Mitigation Using Analog Prewhitening

This paper proposes a novel scheme for mitigating strong interferences, which is applicable to various wireless scenarios, including full-duplex wireless communications and uncoordinated heterogenous networks. As strong interferences can saturate the receiver’s analog-to-digital converters (ADC), they need to be mitigated both before and after the ADCs, i.e., via hybrid processing. The key idea of the proposed scheme, namely the Hybrid Interference Mitigation using Analog Prewhitening (HIMAP), is to insert an M-input M-output analog phase shifter network (PSN) between the receive antennas and the ADCs to spatially prewhiten the interferences, which requires no signal information but only an estimate of the covariance matrix. After interference mitigation by the PSN prewhitener, the preamble can be synchronized, the signal channel response can be estimated, and thus a minimum mean squared error (MMSE) beamformer can be applied in the digital domain to further mitigate the residual interferences. The simulation results verify that the HIMAP scheme can suppress interferences 80dB stronger than the signal by using off-the-shelf phase shifters (PS) of 6-bit resolution.