Papers for
wireless hardware developers
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Soft information perturbation boosts polar code decoding accuracy
Efficient Perturbation-Based SC Decoding for Long Polar Codes
Abstract: Soft information perturbations can significantly improve the successive cancellation (SC) decoding performance of polar codes. This is an effective method for realizing low-latency yet high performance for long polar codes, since each perturbation-based SC (PSC) decoding can be performed in parallel. However, little theoretical insight has been revealed so far regarding its work rationale. This paper provides the theoretical analysis of the soft information perturbation. It reveals that PSC decoding improves the SC decoding performance through correcting the erroneous bit estimations, especially the first erroneous bit (FEB). It further validates that perturbing the soft information does not degrade the error-correction capability of SC decoding. Such revelations lead to the design of optimal perturbations that maximizes the FEB correction probability, resulting in an enhanced PSC decoding performance. Based on this, a novel hybrid PSC (HPSC) decoding is proposed. By introducing the random and biased perturbations, the HPSC decoding can better divert from the initial erroneous estimation and converge to the intended one. Our simulation results demonstrate that with the optimal perturbation, the HPSC decoding can achieve a similar performance as the cyclic redundancy check (CRC) aided SC list (CA-SCL) decoding, while avoiding path sorting and expansion.
Benchmarks enable better comparison of wireless communication methods
Sionna Bench: Towards Benchmarks in Wireless Communications
Abstract: Academic research in wireless communications has no tradition of benchmarks so far. Remarkable progress in benchmark-oriented fields like machine learning suggests that the adoption of benchmarks could benefit our field. In the absence of benchmarks, however, a scientific debt has accumulated: since the academic community has not canonized specific problem setups, methods that address essentially the same problem were often developed for slightly different setups and lack a common framework for comparison. Any attempt to establish a new benchmark is faced with the challenge of resolving this debt. Recent advances in agentic artificial intelligence (AI) create an opportunity to do so by leveraging AI-assisted coding. This makes it possible to implement the state-of-the art at scale and to adapt it to a common framework for comparison. We present Sionna Bench to initiate benchmarks in academic wireless communications research. As a pilot study, we use the problem of MIMO-OFDM channel estimation. At the time of writing, Sionna Bench's channel estimation benchmark features twenty channel estimation methods that were implemented from ten different papers. The ability to compare methods against the state-of-the-art will be crucial for navigating the research landscape in an era where AI-generated methods coexist with human-developed algorithms.
Massive MIMO systems keep speed over limited digital signals and links
Spectral Efficiency Analysis of Massive MIMO-OFDM Systems with Double Quantization
Abstract: Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) achieves a high spectral efficiency (SE) by employing a large number of receive antennas in the uplink. Employing many receive antennas requires a large number of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and a high fronthaul data rate. Low-resolution ADCs can reduce power consumption and cost, while fronthaul quantization can reduce the required fronthaul data rate, at the expense of quantization distortion at both stages. In wideband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems, ADC quantization is performed in the time domain, while fronthaul quantization may be applied after the discrete Fourier transform to transmit only active subcarriers. In this study, we investigate the achievable uplink SE over fronthaul links under double quantization and imperfect channel estimation. We derive a linear minimum mean-squared error channel estimator from the double-quantized pilot observations and obtain an achievable SE using the use-and-then-forget bound. Numerical results demonstrate that the ADC and fronthaul quantization resolutions have comparable impacts on the achievable SE. When the two resolutions differ, the lower resolution becomes the dominant factor limiting the SE. Furthermore, our numerical results show that six-bit ADC and fronthaul quantization achieve more than 90% of the SE attained in the ideal case.
Physics enhanced graph transformers improve antenna design prediction accuracy
Physics-Augmented Graph Transformers for Patch-Antenna Forward and Inverse Design
Abstract: Full-wave electromagnetic (EM) simulation enables accurate patch-antenna analysis but is computationally expensive for large-scale forward prediction and inverse design. We present a mesh-native, physics-augmented graph-learning framework that treats radiation-pattern prediction as signal reconstruction on an irregular surface mesh. For the forward problem, a GPS graph transformer is trained with Physics-Augmented Intermediate Supervision (PAIS), an auxiliary node-level objective that predicts complex surface currents, the physical intermediate linking geometry to radiation. PAIS improves multiple GNN backbones at no inference-time cost, while shuffled-current and non-physical controls show the gain comes from physical correspondence. Direction-conditioned decoding and a differentiable radiation-integral consistency loss further exploit this structure. On an 80,000-sample CST benchmark, GPS+PAIS reaches MSE 0.17 / PSNR 19.67, generalizes to a PCA split, and transfers zero-shot to canonical patches. For inverse design, surrogate-filtered diffusion beats nearest-neighbor retrieval by 32% relative MSE.