Learning-Based Near-Orthogonal Superposition Code for MIMO Short Message Transmission

Abstract

Massive machine type communication (mMTC) has attracted new coding schemes optimized for reliable short message transmission. In this paper, a novel deep learning-based near-orthogonal superposition (NOS) coding scheme is proposed to transmit short messages in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels for mMTC applications. In the proposed MIMO-NOS scheme, a neural network-based encoder is optimized via end-to-end learning with a corresponding neural network-based detector/decoder in a superposition-based auto-encoder framework including a MIMO channel. The proposed MIMO-NOS encoder spreads the information bits to multiple near-orthogonal high dimensional vectors to be combined (superimposed) into a single vector and reshaped for the space-time transmission. For the receiver, we propose a novel looped <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">K</i> -best tree-search algorithm with cyclic redundancy check (CRC) assistance to enhance the error correcting ability in the block-fading MIMO channel. For a comprehensive understanding of the proposed MIMO-NOS scheme, we further quantify the gain from individual components/modules in the framework, and analyze the decoding complexity measured by the floating point operations (FLOPs). Simulation results show the proposed MIMO-NOS scheme outperforms maximum likelihood (ML) MIMO detection combined with a polar code with CRC-assisted list decoding by 1 – 2 dB in various MIMO systems for short (32 – 64 bit) message transmission.