  In this paper we propose and analyze a novel self-interference cancellation
structure for in-band MIMO full-duplex transceivers. The proposed structure
utilizes reference receiver chains to obtain reference signals for digital
self-interference cancellation, which means that all the transmitter-induced
nonidealities will be included in the digital cancellation signal. To the best
of our knowledge, this type of a structure has not been discussed before in the
context of full-duplex transceivers. First, we will analyze the overall
achievable performance of the proposed cancellation scheme, while also
providing some insight into the possible bottlenecks. We also provide a
detailed formulation of the actual cancellation procedure, and perform an
analysis into the effect of the received signal of interest on
self-interference coupling channel estimation. The achieved performance of the
proposed reference receiver based digital cancellation procedure is then
assessed and verified with full waveform simulations. The analysis and waveform
simulation results show that under practical transmitter RF/analog impairment
levels, the proposed reference receiver based cancellation architecture can
provide substantially better self-interference suppression than any existing
solution, despite deploying only low-complexity linear digital processing.
