Artificial Intelligence-aided OFDM Receiver: Design and Experimental Results

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is one of the key technologies that are widely applied in current communication systems. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI)-aided OFDM receivers have been brought to the forefront to break the bottleneck of the traditional OFDM systems. In this paper, we investigate two AI-aided OFDM receivers, data-driven fully connected-deep neural network (FC-DNN) receiver and model-driven ComNet receiver, respectively. We first study their performance under different channel models through simulation and then establish a real-time video transmission system using a 5G rapid prototyping (RaPro) system for over-the-air (OTA) test. To address the performance gap between the simulation and the OTA test caused by the discrepancy between the channel model for offline training and real environments, we develop a novel online training strategy, called SwitchNet receiver. The SwitchNet receiver is with a flexible and extendable architecture and can adapts to real channel by training one parameter online. The OTA test verifies its feasibility and robustness to real environments and indicates its potential for future communications systems. At the end of this paper, we discuss some challenges to inspire future research.