Performance Comparison Between a Simple Full-Duplex Multi-Antenna Relay and a Passive Reflecting Intelligent Surface

In this paper, we propose to investigate a single RF chain multi-antenna full-duplex (FD) relay built with $b$ -bit analog phase shifters and passive self-interference cancellation. Next, assuming only passive self-interference cancellation at the FD relay, we derive the achievable data rate of a system comprised of a source, the proposed FD relay, and a destination. We then compare the achievable data rate of the proposed FD relaying system with the achievable data rate of the same system but with the FD relay replaced by an ideal passive RIS. Our results show that the proposed relaying system with 2-bit quantized analog phase shifters significantly outperforms the RIS-assisted system. In fact, the performance gains are so large, at least for small to intermediate numbers of antenna elements, that we believe it makes this result of interest to the wireless community. The proposed FD relay can also be built with reconfigurable holographic surfaces, one surface for the transmit-side and one for the receive-side. For such a scenario, we derive the energy efficiency of the relay-assisted system and compare it with the RIS-assisted system. Our numerical results show that the energy efficiency of the relay-assisted system built with reconfigurable holographic surfaces is significantly higher than the energy efficiency of the RIS-assisted system. Intuitively, the RIS system is at a disadvantage since there the total transmit power $P_{T}$ is used entirely by the source, whereas in the FD relaying system the total transmit power $P_{T}$ is shared by the source and the FD relay in addition to the noise-cleansing process performed by the decode-and-forwarding at the FD relay.