K. Pavan Srinath

K. Pavan Srinath, Jakob Hoydis

Link-adaptation (LA) is one of the most important aspects of wireless communications where the modulation and coding scheme (MCS) used by the transmitter is adapted to the channel conditions in order to meet a certain target error-rate. In a single-user SISO (SU-SISO) system with out-of-cell interference, LA is performed by computing the post-equalization signal-to-interference-noise ratio (SINR) at the receiver. The same technique can be employed in multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) receivers that use linear detectors. Another important use of post-equalization SINR is for physical layer (PHY) abstraction, where several PHY blocks like the channel encoder, the detector, and the channel decoder are replaced by an abstraction model in order to speed up system-level simulations. However, for MU-MIMO systems with non-linear receivers, there is no known equivalent of post-equalization SINR which makes both LA and PHY abstraction extremely challenging. This important issue is addressed in this two-part paper. In this part, a metric called the bit-metric decoding rate (BMDR) of a detector, which is the proposed equivalent of post-equalization SINR, is presented. Since BMDR does not have a closed form expression that would enable its instantaneous calculation, a machine-learning approach to predict it is presented along with extensive simulation results.

K. Pavan Srinath, Jakob Hoydis

This is the second part of a two-part paper that focuses on link-adaptation (LA) and physical layer (PHY) abstraction for multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems with non-linear receivers. The first part proposes a new metric, called bit-metric decoding rate (BMDR) for a detector, as being the equivalent of post-equalization signal-to-interference-noise ratio (SINR) for non-linear receivers. Since this BMDR does not have a closed form expression, a machine-learning based approach to estimate it effectively is presented. In this part, the concepts developed in the first part are utilized to develop novel algorithms for LA, dynamic detector selection from a list of available detectors, and PHY abstraction in MU-MIMO systems with arbitrary receivers. Extensive simulation results that substantiate the efficacy of the proposed algorithms are presented.

K. Pavan Srinath, Ramji Venkataramanan

This paper considers the problem of estimating a high-dimensional vector of parameters $\boldsymbolθ \in \mathbb{R}^n$ from a noisy observation. The noise vector is i.i.d. Gaussian with known variance. For a squared-error loss function, the James-Stein (JS) estimator is known to dominate the simple maximum-likelihood (ML) estimator when the dimension $n$ exceeds two. The JS-estimator shrinks the observed vector towards the origin, and the risk reduction over the ML-estimator is greatest for $\boldsymbolθ$ that lie close to the origin. JS-estimators can be generalized to shrink the data towards any target subspace. Such estimators also dominate the ML-estimator, but the risk reduction is significant only when $\boldsymbolθ$ lies close to the subspace. This leads to the question: in the absence of prior information about $\boldsymbolθ$, how do we design estimators that give significant risk reduction over the ML-estimator for a wide range of $\boldsymbolθ$? In this paper, we propose shrinkage estimators that attempt to infer the structure of $\boldsymbolθ$ from the observed data in order to construct a good attracting subspace. In particular, the components of the observed vector are separated into clusters, and the elements in each cluster shrunk towards a common attractor. The number of clusters and the attractor for each cluster are determined from the observed vector. We provide concentration results for the squared-error loss and convergence results for the risk of the proposed estimators. The results show that the estimators give significant risk reduction over the ML-estimator for a wide range of $\boldsymbolθ$, particularly for large $n$. Simulation results are provided to support the theoretical claims.