Deep Soft Interference Cancellation for MIMO Detection

Accurate symbol detection in multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) setups, where multiple symbols are simultaneously transmitted, is a challenging task. A family of algorithms capable of reliably recovering multiple symbols is based on interference cancellation. However, these methods assume that the channel is linear, a model which does not reflect many relevant channels, as well as require accurate channel state information (CSI), which may not be available. In this work we propose a multiuser MIMO receiver which learns to jointly detect in a data-driven fashion, without assuming a specific channel model or requiring CSI. In particular, we propose a data-driven implementation of the iterative soft interference cancellation (SIC) algorithm. The resulting detector, referred to as DeepSIC, is based on integrating dedicated machine-learning (ML) methods into the iterative SIC scheme, and learns to carry out joint detection from a limited set of training samples without requiring the channel to be linear and its parameters to be known. Our numerical evaluations demonstrate that for linear channels with full CSI, DeepSIC approaches the performance of iterative SIC, which is comparable to the optimal performance, while being notably more robust to CSI uncertainty. Finally, we show that DeepSIC accurately detects symbols in non-linear channels, where conventional iterative SIC fails even when accurate CSI is available.