skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Leveraging neuro-inspired AI accelerator for high-speed computing in 6G networks
The field of wireless communication is currently being pushed to new boundaries with the emergence of 6G technology. This advanced technology requires substantially increased data rates and processing speeds while simultaneously requiring energy-efficient solutions for real-world practicality. In this work, we apply a neuroscience-inspired machine learning model called echo state network (ESN) to the critical task of symbol detection in massive MIMO-OFDM systems, a key technology for 6G networks. Our work encompasses the design of a hardware-accelerated reservoir neuron architecture to speed up the ESN-based symbol detector. The design is then validated through a proof of concept on the Xilinx Virtex-7 FPGA board in real-world scenarios. The experiment results show the great performance and scalability of our symbol detector design across a range of MIMO configurations, compared with traditional MIMO symbol detection methods like linear minimum mean square error. Our findings also confirm the performance and feasibility of our entire system, reflected in low bit error rates, low resource utilization, and high throughput.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1750450 2314813 1937487 2128594 1731928
PAR ID:
10554656
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Front. Comput. Neurosci.,
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
Volume:
18
ISSN:
1662-5188
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    A 28-GHz one-bit direct-detection based MIMO receiver with wireless LO distribution is presented. Unlike a conventional MIMO structure, in this work the antenna receives both RF and the broadcast single-ended LO, and directly converts them to an IF signal by using a simple low-power square-law detector without the need for a conventional mixer or LO buffers. An LNA with a notch filter is designed to help reduce the non-idealities that appear when the input LO power is lower than that of the RF. A 1-GS/s symbol rate with a high error-vector magnitude is achieved with a power consumption of 33 mW by using a 0.18um SiGe BiCMOS process. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    The Reservoir Computing, a neural computing framework suited for temporal information processing, utilizes a dynamic reservoir layer for high-dimensional encoding, enhancing the separability of the network. In this paper, we exploit a Deep Learning (DL)-based detection strategy for Multiple-input, Multiple-output Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) symbol detection. To be specific, we introduce a Deep Echo State Network (DESN), a unique hierarchical processing structure with multiple time intervals, to enhance the memory capacity and accelerate the detection efficiency. The resulting hardware prototype with the hybrid memristor-CMOS co-design provides in-memory computing and parallel processing capabilities, significantly reducing the hardware and power overhead. With the standard 180nm CMOS process and memristive synapses, the introduced DESN consumes merely 105mW of power consumption, exhibiting 16.7% power reduction compared to shallow ESN designs even with more dynamic layers and associated neurons. Furthermore, numerical evaluations demonstrate the advantages of the DESN over state-of-the-art detection techniques in the literate for MIMO-OFDM systems even with a very limited training set, yielding a 47.8% improvement against conventional symbol detection techniques. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    Overcoming the conventional trade-off between throughput and bit error rate (BER) performance, versus computational complexity is a long-term challenge for uplink Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) detection in base station design for the cellular 5G New Radio roadmap, as well as in next generation wireless local area networks. In this work, we present ParaMax, a MIMO detector architecture that for the first time brings to bear physics-inspired parallel tempering algorithmic techniques [28, 50, 67] on this class of problems. ParaMax can achieve near optimal maximum-likelihood (ML) throughput performance in the Large MIMO regime, Massive MIMO systems where the base station has additional RF chains, to approach the number of base station antennas, in order to support even more parallel spatial streams. ParaMax is able to achieve a near ML-BER performance up to 160 × 160 and 80 × 80 Large MIMO for low-order modulations such as BPSK and QPSK, respectively, only requiring less than tens of processing elements. With respect to Massive MIMO systems, in 12 × 24 MIMO with 16-QAM at SNR 16 dB, ParaMax achieves 330 Mbits/s near-optimal system throughput with 4--8 processing elements per subcarrier, which is approximately 1.4× throughput than linear detector-based Massive MIMO systems. 
    more » « less
  4. In this paper, we introduce a neural network (NN)-based symbol detection scheme for Wi-Fi systems and its associated hardware implementation in software radios. To be specific, reservoir computing (RC), a special type of recurrent neural network (RNN), is adopted to conduct the task of symbol detection for Wi-Fi receivers. Instead of introducing extra training overhead/set to facilitate the RC-based symbol detection, a new training framework is introduced to take advantage of the signal structure in existing Wi-Fi protocols (e.g., IEEE 802.11 standards), that is, the introduced RC-based symbol detector will utilize the inherent long/short training sequences and structured pilots sent by the Wi-Fi transmitter to conduct online learning of the transmit symbols. In other words, our introduced NN-based symbol detector does not require any additional training sets compared to existing Wi-Fi systems. The introduced RC-based Wi-Fi symbol detector is implemented on the software-defined radio (SDR) platform to further provide realistic and meaningful performance comparisons against the traditional Wi-Fi receiver. Over the air, experiment results show that the introduced RC based Wi-Fi symbol detector outperforms conventional Wi-Fi symbol detection methods in various environments indicating the significance and the relevance of our work. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Recently, research on sixth-generation (6G) networks has gained significant interest. 6G is expected to enable a wide-range of applications that fifth-generation (5G) networks will not be able to serve reliably, such as tactile Internet. Additionally, 6G is expected to offer Terabits per second (Tbps) data rates, 10 times lower latency, and near 100% coverage, compared to 5G. Thus, 6G is expected to expand across all available spectrums including terahertz (THz) and optical frequency bands. In this manuscript, mixed-carrier communication (MCC) is investigated as a novel physical layer (PHY) design for 6G networks. The proposed MCC version in this study is based on visible light communication (VLC). MCC enables a unified transmission PHY design to connect devices with different complexities, simultaneously. The design trade-offs and the required signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) per individual modulation schemes embedded within MCC are investigated. The complexity analysis shows that a conventional optical OFDM receiver can capture the high-speed bit-stream embedded within MCC. For a forward error correction (FEC) bit-error-rate (BER) threshold of 3.8×10−3, MCC is optimized to maximize the spectral efficiency by embedding 2-beacon phase-shift keying (2-BnPSK) within an MCC envelope on top of 12 bits per beacon position modulation (BPM) symbol. 
    more » « less