Learned conjugate gradient descent network for massive MIMO detection

In this work, we consider the use of model-driven deep learning techniques for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection. Compared with conventional MIMO systems, massive MIMO promises improved spectral efficiency, coverage and range. Unfortunately, these benefits are at the expense of significantly increased computational complexity. To reduce the complexity of signal detection and guarantee the performance, we present a learned conjugate gradient descent network (LcgNet), which is constructed by unfolding the iterative conjugate gradient descent (CG) detector. In the proposed network, instead of calculating the exact values of the scalar step-sizes, we explicitly learn their universal values. Also, we can enhance the proposed network by augmenting the dimensions of these step-sizes. Furthermore, in order to reduce the memory costs, a novel quantized LcgNet is proposed, where a low-resolution nonuniform quantizer is used to quantize the learned parameters. The quantizer is based on a specially designed soft staircase function with learnable parameters to adjust its shape. Meanwhile, due to fact that the number of learnable parameters is limited, the proposed networks are relatively easy to train. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed network can achieve promising performance with much lower complexity.