Nikola Zlatanov was born in Macedonia. He received his Dipl.Ing. and Master degrees in electrical engineering from Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, Macedonia in 2007 and 2010, respectively, and his PhD degree from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada in 2015. In 2015, he became a Lecturer and in 2020 a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. From 2022, he has been a Professor at Innopolis University, Russia.
His current research interests include wireless communications, information theory, and machine learning.
Dr. Zlatanov is the receptian of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship in 2012, best journal paper award from the German Information Technology Society (ITG) in 2014, best conference paper award at ICNC in 2016, and the ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) in 2018.
Dr. Zlatanov served as an Editor of IEEE Communications Letters in the period 2015-2018, and as an Editor of IEEE Wireless Communications Letters 2020-2023.

Title: Single RF Chain Full-Duplex Multi-Antenna Relays Versus Passive Reflecting Intelligent Surfaces

Abstract:
In this work, we 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.