Finite-Alphabet MMSE Equalization for All-Digital Massive MU-MIMO mmWave Communication

We propose finite-alphabet equalization, a new paradigm that restricts the entries of the spatial equalization matrix to low-resolution numbers, enabling high-throughput, low-power, and low-cost hardware equalizers. To minimize the performance loss of this paradigm, we introduce FAME, short for finite-alphabet minimum mean-square error (MMSE) equalization, which is able to significantly outperform a naive quantization of the linear MMSE matrix. We develop efficient algorithms to approximately solve the NP-hard FAME problem and showcase that near-optimal performance can be achieved with equalization coefficients quantized to only 1-3 bits for massive multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems. We provide very-large scale integration (VLSI) results that demonstrate a reduction in equalization power and area by at least a factor of 3.9x and 5.8x, respectively.Comment: Appeared in the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication

Hardware topologies for decentralized large-scale MIMO detection using Newton method

Centralized Massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) uplink detection techniques for baseband processing possess severe bottleneck in terms of interconnect bandwidth and computational complexity. This problem has been addressed in the current work by adapting the centralized Newton method for decentralized MIMO uplink detection leveraging several Base Station antenna clusters. The proposed decentralized Newton (DN) method achieves error-rate performance close to centralized Zero Forcing detector as compared to other decentralized techniques. Two hardware topologies, namely the ring and the star topologies, are proposed to assess and discuss the trade-off among interconnect bandwidth and throughput, in comparison with contemporary decentralized MIMO uplink detection techniques. As such the following findings are elaborated. On BS antenna cluster scaling for different MIMO system configurations, the ring topology provides high throughput at constant interconnect bandwidth, while the star topology provides lower latency with a deterministic variation in the hardware resource consumption. Due to strategic optimizations on the hardware implementation, additional user equipment can be allotted at a fractional increase in Field Programmable Gate Array resource consumption, improved energy efficiency, and increased transaction of bits per Joule. The ring topology can process additional subcarrier at a fractional increase in latency and improved system throughput

Deep Learning Designs for Physical Layer Communications

Wireless communication systems and their underlying technologies have undergone unprecedented advances over the last two decades to assuage the ever-increasing demands for various applications and emerging technologies. However, the traditional signal processing schemes and algorithms for wireless communications cannot handle the upsurging complexity associated with fifth-generation (5G) and beyond communication systems due to network expansion, new emerging technologies, high data rate, and the ever-increasing demands for low latency. This thesis extends the traditional downlink transmission schemes to deep learning-based precoding and detection techniques that are hardware-efficient and of lower complexity than the current state-of-the-art. The thesis focuses on: precoding/beamforming in massive multiple-inputs-multiple-outputs (MIMO), signal detection and lightweight neural network (NN) architectures for precoder and decoder designs. We introduce a learning-based precoder design via constructive interference (CI) that performs the precoding on a symbol-by-symbol basis. Instead of conventionally training a NN without considering the specifics of the optimisation objective, we unfold a power minimisation symbol level precoding (SLP) formulation based on the interior-point-method (IPM) proximal ‘log’ barrier function. Furthermore, we propose a concept of NN compression, where the weights are quantised to lower numerical precision formats based on binary and ternary quantisations. We further introduce a stochastic quantisation technique, where parts of the NN weight matrix are quantised while the remaining is not. Finally, we propose a systematic complexity scaling of deep neural network (DNN) based MIMO detectors. The model uses a fraction of the DNN inputs by scaling their values through weights that follow monotonically non-increasing functions. Furthermore, we investigate performance complexity tradeoffs via regularisation constraints on the layer weights such that, at inference, parts of network layers can be removed with minimal impact on the detection accuracy. Simulation results show that our proposed learning-based techniques offer better complexity-vs-BER (bit-error-rate) and complexity-vs-transmit power performances compared to the state-of-the-art MIMO detection and precoding techniques