Massive MIMO is a reality—What is next?: Five promising research directions for antenna arrays

The upcoming fifth generation (5G) of wireless networks is expected to lay a foundation of intelligent networks with the provision of some isolated artificial intelligence (AI) operations. However, fully intelligent network orchestration and management for providing innovative services will only be realized in Beyond 5G (B5G) networks. To this end, we envisage that the sixth generation (6G) of wireless networks will be driven by on-demand self-reconfiguration to ensure a many-fold increase in the network performance and service types. The increasingly stringent performance requirements of emerging networks may finally trigger the deployment of some interesting new technologies, such as large intelligent surfaces, electromagnetic–orbital angular momentum, visible light communications, and cell-free communications, to name a few. Our vision for 6G is a massively connected complex network capable of rapidly responding to the users’ service calls through real-time learning of the network state as described by the network edge (e.g., base-station locations and cache contents), air interface (e.g., radio spectrum and propagation channel), and the user-side (e.g., battery-life and locations). The multi-state, multi-dimensional nature of the network state, requiring the real-time knowledge, can be viewed as a quantum uncertainty problem. In this regard, the emerging paradigms of machine learning (ML), quantum computing (QC), and quantum ML (QML) and their synergies with communication networks can be considered as core 6G enablers. Considering these potentials, starting with the 5G target services and enabling technologies, we provide a comprehensive review of the related state of the art in the domains of ML (including deep learning), QC, and QML and identify their potential benefits, issues, and use cases for their applications in the B5G networks. Subsequently, we propose a novel QC-assisted and QML-based framework for 6G communication networks while articulating its challenges and potential enabling technologies at the network infrastructure, network edge, air interface, and user end. Finally, some promising future research directions for the quantum- and QML-assisted B5G networks are identified and discussed.

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Quantum Machine Learning for 6G Communication Networks: State-of-the-Art and Vision for the Future

Characterization and linearization of RF power amplifiers (PAs) are key issues of fifth-generation wireless communication systems, especially when high peak-to-average ratio waveforms are introduced. Recently, deep learning methods have achieved great success in numerous domains including wireless physical-layer. However, there has been limited work in using deep learning for PAs behavioral modeling and linearization. In this paper, we make a bridge between memory effects of the nonlinear PAs and memory of bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) neural networks. We then build a BiLSTM-based behavioral modeling architecture and its accompanying digital predistortion (DPD) model by reconciling a non causality concern. Next, an additional model is proposed in this paper to mitigate uncertainty of the tested PA when transforming phases. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, in which the adequately trained networks are capable of characterizing the PA, and the artificial intelligence-based DPD shows promising linearization performance when considering the tested PAs inherent unpredictability.

Behavioral Modeling and Linearization of Wideband RF Power Amplifiers Using BiLSTM Networks for 5G Wireless Systems

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.

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

This paper describes the architecture and performance of ORACLE, an approach for detecting a unique radio from a large pool of bit-similar devices (same hardware, protocol, physical address, MAC ID) using only IQ samples at the physical layer. ORACLE trains a convolutional neural network (CNN) that balances computational time and accuracy, showing 99% classification accuracy for a 16-node USRP X310 SDR testbed and an external database of >100 COTS WiFi devices. Our work makes the following contributions: (i) it studies the hardware-centric features within the transmitter chain that causes IQ sample variations; (ii) for an idealized static channel environment, it proposes a CNN architecture requiring only raw IQ samples accessible at the front-end, without channel estimation or prior knowledge of the communication protocol; (iii) for dynamic channels, it demonstrates a principled method of feedback-driven transmitter-side modifications that uses channel estimation at the receiver to increase differentiability for the CNN classifier. The key innovation here is to intentionally introduce controlled imperfections on the transmitter side through software directives, while minimizing the change in bit error rate. Unlike previous work that imposes constant environmental conditions, ORACLE adopts the ‘train once deploy anywhere’ paradigm with near-perfect device classification accuracy.

ORACLE: Optimized Radio clAssification through Convolutional neuraL nEtworks

Advances in software defined radio (SDR) technology allow unprecedented control on the entire processing chain, allowing modification of each functional block as well as sampling the changes in the input waveform This article describes a method for uniquely identifying a specific radio among nominally similar devices using a combination of SDR sensing capability and machine learning (ML) techniques The key benefit of this approach is that ML operates on raw I/Q samples and distinguishes devices using only the transmitter hardware-induced signal modifications that serve as a unique signature for a particular device No higher-level decoding, feature engineering, or protocol knowledge is needed, further mitigating challenges of ID spoofing and coexistence of multiple protocols in a shared spectrum The contributions of the article are as follows: (i) The operational blocks in a typical wireless communications processing chain are modified in a simulation study to demonstrate RF impairments, which we exploit (ii) Using an overthe- air dataset compiled from an experimental testbed of SDRs, an optimized deep convolutional neural network architecture is proposed, and results are quantitatively compared with alternate techniques such as support vector machines and logistic regression (iii) Research challenges for increasing the robustness of the approach, as well as the parallel processing needs for efficient training, are described Our work demonstrates up to 90-99 percent experimental accuracy at transmitter- receiver distances varying between 2-50 ft over a noisy, multi-path wireless channel

Deep Learning Convolutional Neural Networks for Radio Identification

This paper describes the architecture and performance of ORACLE, an approach for detecting a unique radio from a large pool of bit-similar devices (same hardware, protocol, physical address, MAC ID) using only IQ samples at the physical layer. ORACLE trains a convolutional neural network (CNN) that balances computational time and accuracy, showing 99\% classification accuracy for a 16-node USRP X310 SDR testbed and an external database of $>$100 COTS WiFi devices. Our work makes the following contributions: (i) it studies the hardware-centric features within the transmitter chain that causes IQ sample variations; (ii) for an idealized static channel environment, it proposes a CNN architecture requiring only raw IQ samples accessible at the front-end, without channel estimation or prior knowledge of the communication protocol; (iii) for dynamic channels, it demonstrates a principled method of feedback-driven transmitter-side modifications that uses channel estimation at the receiver to increase differentiability for the CNN classifier. The key innovation here is to intentionally introduce controlled imperfections on the transmitter side through software directives, while minimizing the change in bit error rate. Unlike previous work that imposes constant environmental conditions, ORACLE adopts the `train once deploy anywhere' paradigm with near-perfect device classification accuracy.

Shamnaz Riyaz

Papers

Deep Learning Convolutional Neural Networks for Radio Identification

ORACLE: Optimized Radio clAssification through Convolutional neuraL nEtworks

ORACLE: Optimized Radio clAssification through Convolutional neuraL nEtworks