Neural networks for optical channel equalization in high speed communication systems

La demande future de bande passante pour les données dépassera les capacités des systèmes de communication optique actuels, qui approchent de leurs limites en raison des limitations de la bande passante électrique des composants de l’émetteur. L’interférence intersymbole (ISI) due à cette limitation de bande est le principal facteur de dégradation pour atteindre des débits de données élevés. Dans ce mémoire, nous étudions plusieurs techniques de réseaux neuronaux (NN) pour combattre les limites physiques des composants de l’émetteur pilotés à des débits de données élevés et exploitant les formats de modulation avancés avec une détection cohérente. Notre objectif principal avec les NN comme égaliseurs de canaux ISI est de surmonter les limites des récepteurs optimaux conventionnels, en fournissant une complexité évolutive moindre et une solution quasi optimale. Nous proposons une nouvelle architecture bidirectionnelle profonde de mémoire à long terme (BiLSTM), qui est efficace pour atténuer les graves problèmes d’ISI causés par les composants à bande limitée. Pour la première fois, nous démontrons par simulation que notre BiLSTM profonde proposée atteint le même taux d’erreur sur les bits(TEB) qu’un estimateur de séquence à maximum de vraisemblance (MLSE) optimal pour la modulation MDPQ. Les NN étant des modèles pilotés par les données, leurs performances dépendent fortement de la qualité des données d’entrée. Nous démontrons comment les performances du BiLSTM profond réalisable se dégradent avec l’augmentation de l’ordre de modulation. Nous examinons également l’impact de la sévérité de l’ISI et de la longueur de la mémoire du canal sur les performances de la BiLSTM profonde. Nous étudions les performances de divers canaux synthétiques à bande limitée ainsi qu’un canal optique mesuré à 100 Gbaud en utilisant un modulateur photonique au silicium (SiP) de 35 GHz. La gravité ISI de ces canaux est quantifiée grâce à une nouvelle vue graphique des performances basée sur les écarts de performance de base entre les solutions optimales linéaires et non linéaires classiques. Aux ordres QAM supérieurs à la QPSK, nous quantifions l’écart de performance BiLSTM profond par rapport à la MLSE optimale à mesure que la sévérité ISI augmente. Alors qu’elle s’approche des performances optimales de la MLSE à 8QAM et 16QAM avec une pénalité, elle est capable de dépasser largement la solution optimale linéaire à 32QAM. Plus important encore, l’avantage de l’utilisation de modèles d’auto-apprentissage comme les NN est leur capacité à apprendre le canal pendant la formation, alors que la MLSE optimale nécessite des informations précises sur l’état du canal.The future demand for the data bandwidth will surpass the capabilities of current optical communication systems, which are approaching their limits due to the electrical bandwidth limitations of the transmitter components. Inter-symbol interference (ISI) due to this band limitation is the major degradation factor to achieve high data rates. In this thesis, we investigate several neural network (NN) techniques to combat the physical limits of the transmitter components driven at high data rates and exploiting the advanced modulation formats with coherent detection. Our main focus with NNs as ISI channel equalizers is to overcome the limitations of conventional optimal receivers, by providing lower scalable complexity and near optimal solution. We propose a novel deep bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) architecture, that is effective in mitigating severe ISI caused by bandlimited components. For the first time, we demonstrate via simulation that our proposed deep BiLSTM achieves the same bit error rate (BER) performance as an optimal maximum likelihood sequence estimator (MLSE) for QPSK modulation. The NNs being data-driven models, their performance acutely depends on input data quality. We demonstrate how the achievable deep BiLSTM performance degrades with the increase in modulation order. We also examine the impact of ISI severity and channel memory length on deep BiLSTM performance. We investigate the performances of various synthetic band-limited channels along with a measured optical channel at 100 Gbaud using a 35 GHz silicon photonic(SiP) modulator. The ISI severity of these channels is quantified with a new graphical view of performance based on the baseline performance gaps between conventional linear and nonlinear optimal solutions. At QAM orders above QPSK, we quantify deep BiLSTM performance deviation from the optimal MLSE as ISI severity increases. While deep BiLSTM approaches the optimal MLSE performance at 8QAM and 16QAM with a penalty, it is able to greatly surpass the linear optimal solution at 32QAM. More importantly, the advantage of using self learning models like NNs is their ability to learn the channel during the training, while the optimal MLSE requires accurate channel state information

Massive MIMO is a Reality -- What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays

Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) is no longer a "wild" or "promising" concept for future cellular networks - in 2018 it became a reality. Base stations (BSs) with 64 fully digital transceiver chains were commercially deployed in several countries, the key ingredients of Massive MIMO have made it into the 5G standard, the signal processing methods required to achieve unprecedented spectral efficiency have been developed, and the limitation due to pilot contamination has been resolved. Even the development of fully digital Massive MIMO arrays for mmWave frequencies - once viewed prohibitively complicated and costly - is well underway. In a few years, Massive MIMO with fully digital transceivers will be a mainstream feature at both sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies. In this paper, we explain how the first chapter of the Massive MIMO research saga has come to an end, while the story has just begun. The coming wide-scale deployment of BSs with massive antenna arrays opens the door to a brand new world where spatial processing capabilities are omnipresent. In addition to mobile broadband services, the antennas can be used for other communication applications, such as low-power machine-type or ultra-reliable communications, as well as non-communication applications such as radar, sensing and positioning. We outline five new Massive MIMO related research directions: Extremely large aperture arrays, Holographic Massive MIMO, Six-dimensional positioning, Large-scale MIMO radar, and Intelligent Massive MIMO.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Digital Signal Processin

Multiuser MIMO-OFDM for Next-Generation Wireless Systems

This overview portrays the 40-year evolution of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) research. The amelioration of powerful multicarrier OFDM arrangements with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems has numerous benefits, which are detailed in this treatise. We continue by highlighting the limitations of conventional detection and channel estimation techniques designed for multiuser MIMO OFDM systems in the so-called rank-deficient scenarios, where the number of users supported or the number of transmit antennas employed exceeds the number of receiver antennas. This is often encountered in practice, unless we limit the number of users granted access in the base station’s or radio port’s coverage area. Following a historical perspective on the associated design problems and their state-of-the-art solutions, the second half of this treatise details a range of classic multiuser detectors (MUDs) designed for MIMO-OFDM systems and characterizes their achievable performance. A further section aims for identifying novel cutting-edge genetic algorithm (GA)-aided detector solutions, which have found numerous applications in wireless communications in recent years. In an effort to stimulate the cross pollination of ideas across the machine learning, optimization, signal processing, and wireless communications research communities, we will review the broadly applicable principles of various GA-assisted optimization techniques, which were recently proposed also for employment inmultiuser MIMO OFDM. In order to stimulate new research, we demonstrate that the family of GA-aided MUDs is capable of achieving a near-optimum performance at the cost of a significantly lower computational complexity than that imposed by their optimum maximum-likelihood (ML) MUD aided counterparts. The paper is concluded by outlining a range of future research options that may find their way into next-generation wireless systems

Efficient DSP and Circuit Architectures for Massive MIMO: State-of-the-Art and Future Directions

Massive MIMO is a compelling wireless access concept that relies on the use of an excess number of base-station antennas, relative to the number of active terminals. This technology is a main component of 5G New Radio (NR) and addresses all important requirements of future wireless standards: a great capacity increase, the support of many simultaneous users, and improvement in energy efficiency. Massive MIMO requires the simultaneous processing of signals from many antenna chains, and computational operations on large matrices. The complexity of the digital processing has been viewed as a fundamental obstacle to the feasibility of Massive MIMO in the past. Recent advances on system-algorithm-hardware co-design have led to extremely energy-efficient implementations. These exploit opportunities in deeply-scaled silicon technologies and perform partly distributed processing to cope with the bottlenecks encountered in the interconnection of many signals. For example, prototype ASIC implementations have demonstrated zero-forcing precoding in real time at a 55 mW power consumption (20 MHz bandwidth, 128 antennas, multiplexing of 8 terminals). Coarse and even error-prone digital processing in the antenna paths permits a reduction of consumption with a factor of 2 to 5. This article summarizes the fundamental technical contributions to efficient digital signal processing for Massive MIMO. The opportunities and constraints on operating on low-complexity RF and analog hardware chains are clarified. It illustrates how terminals can benefit from improved energy efficiency. The status of technology and real-life prototypes discussed. Open challenges and directions for future research are suggested.Comment: submitted to IEEE transactions on signal processin

Channel Estimation and ICI Cancelation in Vehicular Channels of OFDM Wireless Communication Systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme increases bandwidth efficiency (BE) of data transmission and eliminates inter symbol interference (ISI). As a result, it has been widely used for wideband communication systems that have been developed during the past two decades and it can be a good candidate for the emerging communication systems such as fifth generation (5G) cellular networks with high carrier frequency and communication systems of high speed vehicles such as high speed trains (HSTs) and supersonic unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs). However, the employment of OFDM for those upcoming systems is challenging because of high Doppler shifts. High Doppler shift makes the wideband communication channel to be both frequency selective and time selective, doubly selective (DS), causes inter carrier interference (ICI) and destroys the orthogonality between the subcarriers of OFDM signal. In order to demodulate the signal in OFDM systems and mitigate ICIs, channel state information (CSI) is required. In this work, we deal with channel estimation (CE) and ICI cancellation in DS vehicular channels. The digitized model of the DS channels can be short and dense, or long and sparse. CE methods that perform well for short and dense channels are highly inefficient for long and sparse channels. As a result, for the latter type of channels, we proposed the employment of compressed sensing (CS) based schemes for estimating the channel. In addition, we extended our CE methods for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) scenarios. We evaluated the CE accuracy and data demodulation fidelity, along with the BE and computational complexity of our methods and compared the results with the previous CE procedures in different environments. The simulation results indicate that our proposed CE methods perform considerably better than the conventional CE schemes

Single-Frequency Network Terrestrial Broadcasting with 5GNR Numerology

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen