  This paper proposes an active radio frequency (RF) cancellation solution to
suppress the transmitter (TX) passband leakage signal in radio transceivers
supporting simultaneous transmission and reception. The proposed technique is
based on creating an opposite-phase baseband equivalent replica of the TX
leakage signal in the transceiver digital front-end through adaptive nonlinear
filtering of the known transmit data, to facilitate highly accurate
cancellation under a nonlinear TX power amplifier (PA). The active RF
cancellation is then accomplished by employing an auxiliary transmitter chain,
to generate the actual RF cancellation signal, and combining it with the
received signal at the receiver (RX) low noise amplifier (LNA) input. A
closed-loop parameter learning approach, based on the decorrelation principle,
is also developed to efficiently estimate the coefficients of the nonlinear
cancellation filter in the presence of a nonlinear TX PA with memory, finite
passive isolation, and a nonlinear RX LNA. The performance of the proposed
cancellation technique is evaluated through comprehensive RF measurements
adopting commercial LTE-Advanced transceiver hardware components. The results
show that the proposed technique can provide an additional suppression of up to
54 dB for the TX passband leakage signal at the RX LNA input, even at
considerably high transmit power levels and with wide transmission bandwidths.
Such novel cancellation solution can therefore substantially improve the TX-RX
isolation, hence reducing the requirements on passive isolation and RF
component linearity, as well as increasing the efficiency and flexibility of
the RF spectrum use in the emerging 5G radio networks.
