AI Models for Digital Signal Processing in Future 6G-IoT Networks

Abstract

Wireless technologies are of paramount importance to today's societies and future 6th generation communication networks are expected to address many societal and technological challenges. While communications infrastructures have a growing environmental impact that needs to be reduced, digital technologies also have a role to play in reducing the impact of all sectors of the economy. To this end, the future networks will not only have to enable more efficient information transfer, but also meet the growing need for data exchange capacity. This is particularly the role of the Internet of Things use cases, where a massive number of sensors allow to monitor complex systems. These use cases are associated with many constraints such as limited energy resources and complexity. Therefore, an efficient and low-complexity physical layer - responsible for the transmission of information between the network nodes - is absolutely crucial. In this regard, the use of artificial intelligence techniques is relevant. On the one hand, the mathematical framework of neural networks allows for efficient and low-cost generic hardware implementations. On the other hand, the application of learning procedures can improve the performance of certain algorithms. In this work, we are interested in the use of neural networks and machine learning for digital signal processing in the context of 6G-IoT networks. First, we are interested in the transcription of certain equalisation, demodulation and decoding algorithms from the digital communications literature into neural networks. Secondly, we are interested in the application of learning mechanisms on these neural network structures in order to improve their performance. A linear block decoder is proposed which allows the blind discovery of a decoding scheme whose performance is at least equivalent to that of the reference decoder. Finally, an end-to-end structure is presented, allowing joint learning of an encoding/decoding scheme with performance and complexity comparable to state-of-the-art solutions.