Recent Advances in Deep Learning for Channel Coding: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive survey on recent advances in deep learning (DL) techniques for the channel coding problems. Inspired by the recent successes of DL in a variety of research domains, its applications to the physical layer technologies have been extensively studied in recent years, and are expected to be a potential breakthrough in supporting the emerging use cases of the next generation wireless communication systems such as 6G. In this paper, we focus exclusively on the channel coding problems and review existing approaches that incorporate advanced DL techniques into code design and channel decoding. After briefly introducing the background of recent DL techniques, we categorize and summarize a variety of approaches, including model-free and mode-based DL, for the design and decoding of modern error-correcting codes, such as low-density parity check (LDPC) codes and polar codes, to highlight their potential advantages and challenges. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of open issues and future research directions in channel coding.

Single-Carrier Delay-Doppler Domain Equalization

For doubly-selective channels, delay-Doppler (DD) modulation, mostly known as orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation, enables simultaneous compensation of delay and Doppler shifts. However, OTFS modulated signal has high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) because of its precoding operation performed over the DD domain. In order to deal with this problem, we propose a single-carrier transmission with delay-Doppler domain equalization (SC-DDE). In this system, the discretized time-domain SC signal is converted to the DD domain by discrete Zak transform (DZT) at the receiver side, followed by delay-Doppler domain equalization (DDE). Since equalization is performed in the DD domain, the SC-DDE receiver should acquire the channel delay-Doppler response. To this end, we introduce an embedded pilot-aided channel estimation scheme designed for SC-DDE, which does not affect the peak power property of transmitted signals. Through computer simulation, distribution of PAPR and bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed system are compared with those of the conventional OTFS and SC with frequency-domain equalization (SC-FDE). As a result, our proposed SC-DDE significantly outperforms SC-FDE in terms of BER at the expense of additional computational complexity at the receiver. Furthermore, SC-DDE shows much lower PAPR than OTFS even though they achieve comparable coded BER performance.

Secrecy Design of Indoor Visible Light Communication Network under Downlink NOMA Transmission

In this work, we investigate the transmission sum rate as well as the secrecy sum rate of indoor visible light communication (VLC) networks for mobile devices with the power domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission, where multiple legitimate users are equipped with photodiodes (PDs). We introduce a body blockage model of the legitimate users as well as the eavesdropper to focus on the case where the communications from transmitting light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to receiving devices are blocked by the bodies of receiving users. Furthermore, in order to improve the secrecy without any knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) of the eavesdropper, a novel LED arrangement is introduced to reduce the overlapping area covered by LED units supporting different users. We also propose two LED operation strategies, called simple and smart LED linking, and evaluate their performance against the conventional broadcasting in terms of transmission sum rate and secrecy sum rate. Through computer simulations, the superiority of our proposed strategies is demonstrated.

On Rate-Splitting With Non-unique Decoding In Multi-cell Massive MIMO Systems

We consider the downlink of a multi-cell massive MIMO system suffering from asymptotic rate saturation due to pilot contamination. As opposed to treating pilot contamination interference as noise (TIN), we study the performance of decoding the pilot contamination interference. We model pilot-sharing users as an interference channel (IC) and study the performance of schemes that decode this interference partially based on rate-splitting (RS), and compare the performance to schemes that decode the interference in its entirety based on simultaneous unique decoding (SD) or non-unique decoding (SND). For RS, we non-uniquely decode each layer of the pilot contamination interference and use one common power splitting coefficient per IC. Additionally, we establish an achievable region for this RS scheme. Solving a maximum symmetric rate allocation problem based on linear programming (LP), we show that for zero-forcing (ZF) with spatially correlated/uncorrelated channels and with a practical number of BS antennas, RS achieves significantly higher spectral efficiencies than TIN, SD and SND. Furthermore, we numerically examine the impact of increasing the correlation of the channel across antennas, the number of users as well as the degree of shadow fading. In all cases, we show that RS maintains significant gain over TIN, SD and SND.