Pilot-Assisted Channel Estimation and Signal Detection in Uplink Multi-User MIMO Systems with Deep Learning

In this paper, we propose two deep learning (DL) based receiver schemes in uplink multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In the first scheme, we design a pilot-assisted MIMO receiver using a data-driven full connected neural network. This data-driven receiver can recover transmitted signal directly in an end-to-end manner without explicitly estimating channel. In the second scheme, we adopt a model-driven network which combines communication knowledge with DL. The model-driven scheme divides the MIMO receiver into channel estimation subnet and signal detection subnet, and each subnet is composed of a traditional solution as initialization and a DL network to further improve the accurate. The simulation results show that both of the two schemes achieve better bit error ratio (BER) performance than traditional methods. In particular, the data-driven scheme can achieve optimal BER performance in low-dimensional MIMO systems, while the model-driven scheme can be trained with fewer trainable parameters and outperforms the data-driven scheme in high-dimension MIMO systems.