Deep Learning-Based Communication Over the Air

End-to-end learning of communications systems is a fascinating novel concept that has so far only been validated by simulations for block-based transmissions. It allows learning of transmitter and receiver implementations as deep neural networks (NNs) that are optimized for an arbitrary differentiable end-to-end performance metric, e.g., block error rate (BLER). In this paper, we demonstrate that over-the-air transmissions are possible: We build, train, and run a complete communications system solely composed of NNs using unsynchronized off-the-shelf software-defined radios (SDRs) and open-source deep learning (DL) software libraries. We extend the existing ideas towards continuous data transmission which eases their current restriction to short block lengths but also entails the issue of receiver synchronization. We overcome this problem by introducing a frame synchronization module based on another NN. A comparison of the BLER performance of the "learned" system with that of a practical baseline shows competitive performance close to 1 dB, even without extensive hyperparameter tuning. We identify several practical challenges of training such a system over actual channels, in particular the missing channel gradient, and propose a two-step learning procedure based on the idea of transfer learning that circumvents this issue

Physical Layer Communications System Design Over-the-Air Using Adversarial Networks

This paper presents a novel method for synthesizing new physical layer modulation and coding schemes for communications systems using a learning-based approach which does not require an analytic model of the impairments in the channel. It extends prior work published on the channel autoencoder to consider the case where the channel response is not known or can not be easily modeled in a closed form analytic expression. By adopting an adversarial approach for channel response approximation and information encoding, we can jointly learn a good solution to both tasks over a wide range of channel environments. We describe the operation of the proposed adversarial system, share results for its training and validation over-the-air, and discuss implications and future work in the area

A Generalized Data Representation and Training-Performance Analysis for Deep Learning-Based Communications Systems

Deep learning (DL)-based autoencoder is a potential architecture to implement end-to-end communication systems. In this letter, we first give a brief introduction to the autoencoder-represented communication system. Then, we propose a novel generalized data representation (GDR) aiming to improve the data rate of DL-based communication systems. Finally, simulation results show that the proposed GDR scheme has lower training complexity, comparable block error rate performance and higher channel capacity than the conventional one-hot vector scheme. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in DL-based communication systems and prove that training at a high SNR could produce a good training performance for autoencoder

Channel Agnostic End-to-End Learning based Communication Systems with Conditional GAN

In this article, we use deep neural networks (DNNs) to develop a wireless end-to-end communication system, in which DNNs are employed for all signal-related functionalities, such as encoding, decoding, modulation, and equalization. However, accurate instantaneous channel transfer function, \emph{i.e.}, the channel state information (CSI), is necessary to compute the gradient of the DNN representing. In many communication systems, the channel transfer function is hard to obtain in advance and varies with time and location. In this article, this constraint is released by developing a channel agnostic end-to-end system that does not rely on any prior information about the channel. We use a conditional generative adversarial net (GAN) to represent the channel effects, where the encoded signal of the transmitter will serve as the conditioning information. In addition, in order to deal with the time-varying channel, the received signal corresponding to the pilot data can also be added as a part of the conditioning information. From the simulation results, the proposed method is effective on additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels, which opens a new door for building data-driven communication systems

Beamforming Design for Large-Scale Antenna Arrays Using Deep Learning

Beamforming (BF) design for large-scale antenna arrays with limited radio frequency chains and the phase-shifter-based analog BF architecture, has been recognized as a key issue in millimeter wave communication systems. It becomes more challenging with imperfect channel state information (CSI). In this letter, we propose a deep learning based BF design approach and develop a BF neural network (BFNN) which can be trained to learn how to optimize the beamformer for maximizing the spectral efficiency with hardware limitation and imperfect CSI. Simulation results show that the proposed BFNN achieves significant performance improvement and strong robustness to imperfect CSI over the conventional BF algorithms.Comment: The codes are available in https://github.com/TianLin0509/BF-design-with-D

Decentralized Deep Scheduling for Interference Channels

In this paper, we study the problem of decentralized scheduling in Interference Channels (IC). In this setting, each Transmitter (TX) receives an arbitrary amount of feedback regarding the global multi-user channel state based on which it decides whether to transmit or to stay silent without any form of communication with the other TXs. While many methods have been proposed to tackle the problem of link scheduling in the presence of reliable Channel State Information (CSI), finding the optimally robust transmission strategy in the presence of arbitrary channel uncertainties at each TX has remained elusive for the past years. In this work, we recast the link scheduling problem as a decentralized classification problem and we propose the use of Collaborative Deep Neural Networks (C-DNNs) to solve this problem. After adequate training, the scheduling obtained using the C-DNNs flexibly adapts to the decentralized CSI configuration to outperform other scheduling algorithms.Comment: Submitted to the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC

Deep Learning-Based Channel Estimation for High-Dimensional Signals

We propose a novel deep learning-based channel estimation technique for high-dimensional communication signals that does not require any training. Our method is broadly applicable to channel estimation for multicarrier signals with any number of antennas, and has low enough complexity to be used in a mobile station. The proposed deep channel estimator can outperform LS estimation with nearly the same complexity, and approach MMSE estimation performance to within 1 dB without knowing the second order statistics. The only complexity increase with respect to LS estimator lies in fitting the parameters of a deep neural network (DNN) periodically on the order of the channel coherence time. We empirically show that the main benefit of this method accrues from the ability of this specially designed DNN to exploit correlations in the time-frequency grid. The proposed estimator can also reduce the number of pilot tones needed in an OFDM time-frequency grid, e.g. in an LTE scenario by 98% (68%) when the channel coherence time interval is 73ms (4.5ms)

A Deep Learning Wireless Transceiver with Fully Learned Modulation and Synchronization

In this paper, we present a deep learning based wireless transceiver. We describe in detail the corresponding artificial neural network architecture, the training process, and report on excessive over-the-air measurement results. We employ the end-to-end training approach with an autoencoder model that includes a channel model in the middle layers as previously proposed in the literature. In contrast to other state-of-the-art results, our architecture supports learning time synchronization without any manually designed signal processing operations. Moreover, the neural transceiver has been tested over the air with an implementation in software defined radio. Our experimental results for the implemented single antenna system demonstrate a raw bit-rate of 0.5 million bits per second. This exceeds results from comparable systems presented in the literature and suggests the feasibility of high throughput deep learning transceivers.Comment: Presented at ICC 2019- 2nd Workshop on Machine Learning in Wireless Communications (ML4COM

Joint Transceiver Optimization for Wireless Communication PHY with Convolutional Neural Network

Deep Learning has a wide application in the area of natural language processing and image processing due to its strong ability of generalization. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network structure for jointly optimizing the transmitter and receiver in communication physical layer under fading channels. We build up a convolutional autoencoder to simultaneously conduct the role of modulation, equalization and demodulation. The proposed system is able to design different mapping scheme from input bit sequences of arbitrary length to constellation symbols according to different channel environments. The simulation results show that the performance of neural network based system is superior to traditional modulation and equalization methods in terms of time complexity and bit error rate (BER) under fading channels. The proposed system can also be combined with other coding techniques to further improve the performance. Furthermore, the proposed system network is more robust to channel variation than traditional communication methods

Deep Learning for the Gaussian Wiretap Channel

End-to-end learning of communication systems with neural networks and particularly autoencoders is an emerging research direction which gained popularity in the last year. In this approach, neural networks learn to simultaneously optimize encoding and decoding functions to establish reliable message transmission. In this paper, this line of thinking is extended to communication scenarios in which an eavesdropper must further be kept ignorant about the communication. The secrecy of the transmission is achieved by utilizing a modified secure loss function based on cross-entropy which can be implemented with state-of-the-art machine-learning libraries. This secure loss function approach is applied in a Gaussian wiretap channel setup, for which it is shown that the neural network learns a trade-off between reliable communication and information secrecy by clustering learned constellations. As a result, an eavesdropper with higher noise cannot distinguish between the symbols anymore.Comment: 6 pages, 11 figure