Robust Non-Linear Feedback Coding via Power-Constrained Deep Learning
This addresses the long-standing open problem of feedback-enabled communication reliability for applications like wireless networks, though it is incremental as it builds on deep learning-based coding schemes.
The paper tackled the problem of designing robust non-linear feedback codes for noisy communication channels by developing an autoencoder-based architecture with power control, resulting in significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art feedback codes in practical noise regimes.
The design of codes for feedback-enabled communications has been a long-standing open problem. Recent research on non-linear, deep learning-based coding schemes have demonstrated significant improvements in communication reliability over linear codes, but are still vulnerable to the presence of forward and feedback noise over the channel. In this paper, we develop a new family of non-linear feedback codes that greatly enhance robustness to channel noise. Our autoencoder-based architecture is designed to learn codes based on consecutive blocks of bits, which obtains de-noising advantages over bit-by-bit processing to help overcome the physical separation between the encoder and decoder over a noisy channel. Moreover, we develop a power control layer at the encoder to explicitly incorporate hardware constraints into the learning optimization, and prove that the resulting average power constraint is satisfied asymptotically. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our scheme outperforms state-of-the-art feedback codes by wide margins over practical forward and feedback noise regimes, and provide information-theoretic insights on the behavior of our non-linear codes. Moreover, we observe that, in a long blocklength regime, canonical error correction codes are still preferable to feedback codes when the feedback noise becomes high.