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arXiv:2403.16045 · IEEE Wireless Communications Letters

MIMO With Analogue 1-Bit Phase Shifters: A Quantum Annealing Perspective

Ioannis Krikidis

Published Mar 26, 2024• 6 citations
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Abstract

In this letter, we study the analogue pre/post-coding vector design for a point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with 1-bit phase shifters. Specifically, we focus on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) maximization problem which corresponds to a combinatorial NP-hard due to the binary phase resolution. Two classical computation heuristics are proposed i.e., i) an 1-bit real-valued approximation of the optimal digital designs, and ii) an alternating optimization where a Rayleigh quotient problem is solved at each iteration. An iterative quantum annealing (QA)-based heuristic is also investigated, which outperforms classical counterparts and achieves near-optimal performance while ensuring polynomial time complexity. Experimental results in a real-world D-WAVE QA device validate the efficiency of the proposed QA approach.

DOI
10.1109/lwc.2024.3382095

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In this letter, we study the analogue pre/post-coding vector design for a point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with 1-bit phase shifters. Specifically, we focus on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) maximization problem which corresponds to a combinatorial NP-hard due to the binary phase resolution. Two classical computation heuristics are proposed i.e., i) an 1-bit real-valued approximation of the optimal digital designs, and ii) an alternating optimization where a Rayleigh quotient problem is solved at each iteration. An iterative quantum annealing (QA)-based heuristic is also investigated, which outperforms classical counterparts and achieves near-optimal performance while ensuring polynomial time complexity. Experimental results in a real-world D-WAVE QA device validate the efficiency of the proposed QA approach.
In this paper, we study the problem of digital pre/post-coding design in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with 1-bit resolution per complex dimension. The optimal solution that maximizes the received signal-to-noise ratio relies on an NP-hard combinatorial problem that requires exhaustive searching with exponential complexity. By using the principles of alternating optimization and quantum annealing (QA), an iterative QA-based algorithm is proposed that achieves near-optimal performance with polynomial complexity. The algorithm is associated with a rigorous mathematical framework that casts the pre/post-coding vector design to appropriate real-valued quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems. Experimental results in a state-of-the-art D-WAVE QA device validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. To further improve the efficiency of the D-WAVE quantum device, a new pre-processing technique which preserves the quadratic QUBO matrix from the detrimental effects of the Hamiltonian noise through non-linear companding, is proposed. The proposed pre-processing technique significantly improves the quality of the D-WAVE solutions as well as the occurrence probability of the optimal solution.
In this article, we study the problem of digital pre/postcoding design in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with 1-b resolution per complex dimension. The optimal solution that maximizes the received signal-to-noise ratio relies on an NP-hard combinatorial problem that requires exhaustive searching with exponential complexity. By using the principles of alternating optimization and quantum annealing (QA), an iterative QA-based algorithm is proposed that achieves near-optimal performance with polynomial complexity. The algorithm is associated with a rigorous mathematical framework that casts the pre/postcoding vector design to appropriate real-valued quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems. Experimental results in a state-of-the-art D-WAVE QA device validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. To further improve the efficiency of the D-WAVE quantum device, a new preprocessing technique, which preserves the quadratic QUBO matrix from the detrimental effects of the Hamiltonian noise through nonlinear companding, is proposed. The proposed preprocessing technique significantly improves the quality of the D-WAVE solutions as well as the occurrence probability of the optimal solution.
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is critical for 6G communication, offering improved spectral efficiency and reliability. However, conventional fully digital designs face significant challenges due to high hardware complexity and power consumption. Low-bit MIMO architectures, such as those employingbbb-bit quantized phase shifters, provide a cost-effective alternative but introduce NP-hard combinatorial problems in the pre- and post-coding design. This paper explores the use of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and alternating optimization to address the problem ofbbb-bit quantized phase shifters both at the transmitter and the receiver. We demonstrate that the structure of this quantized beamforming problem aligns naturally with hybrid-classical methods like QAOA, as the phase shifts used in beamforming can be directly mapped to rotation gates in a quantum circuit. Notably, this paper is the first to show that theoretical connection. Then, the Hamiltonian derivation analysis for thebbb-bit case is presented, which could have applications in different fields, such as integrated sensing and communication, and emerging quantum algorithms such as quantum machine learning. In addition, a warm-start QAOA approach is studied which improves computational efficiency. Numerical results highlight the effectiveness of the proposed methods in achieving an improved quantized beamforming gain over their classical optimization benchmarks from the literature.
In a multi-user system with multiple antennas at the base station, precoding techniques in the downlink broadcast channel allow users to detect their respective data in a non-cooperative manner. Vector Perturbation Precoding (VPP) is a non-linear variant of transmit-side channel inversion that perturbs user data to achieve full diversity order. While promising, finding an optimal perturbation in VPP is known to be an NP-hard problem, demanding heavy computational support at the base station and limiting the feasibility of the approach to small MIMO systems. This work proposes a radically different processing architecture for the downlink VPP problem, one based on Quantum Annealing (QA), to enable the applicability of VPP to large MIMO systems. Our design reduces VPP to a quadratic polynomial form amenable to QA, then refines the problem coefficients to mitigate the adverse effects of QA hardware noise. We evaluate our proposed QA based VPP (QAVP) technique on a real Quantum Annealing device over a variety of design and machine parameter settings. With existing hardware, QAVP can achieve a BER of 10−4with 100µs compute time, for a 6 × 6 MIMO system using 64 QAM modulation at 32 dB SNR.
The Integrated Side Lobe Ratio (ISLR) problem we consider here consists in finding optimal sequences of phase shifts in order to minimize the mean squared cross-correlation sidelobes of a transmitted radar signal and a mismatched replica. Given a finite set of quantized phase shifts, the exponentially increasing number of possible sequences leads to long-time processing and approximated results. Currently, ISLR does not seem to be easier than the general polynomial unconstrained binary problem, which is NP-hard. Our contribution is to implement this problem on a Quantum Annealer, a kind of Quantum Computer designed to solve quadratic optimization problems with binary variables. We cast the problem in a suitable formulation to be run on the available DWave quantum device and discuss the performances. Our work shows two limiting factors for scalability: A hardware related one and constraint implementation in the QUBO formulation. More broadly, this study enlightens the limits and the potential of Adiabatic Quantum Computation in terms of speedup and high-scaled resolution of a class of combinatory optimization problems.
We propose a Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm with a deterministic linear ramp schedule (QAOA-LR) for phase optimization of a 1-bit RIS-assisted MIMO communication system. Each RIS element is restricted to a binary phase shift of 0 or π, turning the passive beamforming design problem with N elements into a combinatorial optimization problem over 2^N configurations. Instead of running a classical optimizer, QAOA-LR uses a fixed linear ramp to set the variational parameters across p layers and finds the best scale via a simple one-dimensional grid search over a single parameter. Monte Carlo simulations over Rayleigh-fading MIMO channels confirm that QAOA-LR closely tracks the optimum maximum-likelihood (ML) solution. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm reduces the computational complexity compared with classical optimization, and real hardware experiments on the IBM Quantum processor confirm near-ML capacity performance with polynomial scaling of quantum processing unit execution time as the number of RIS elements increases.