Seminar • Systems and Networking — Leveraging Quantum Annealing for Large MIMO Processing in Centralized Radio Access Networks

Wednesday, May 29, 2019 10:30 am - 10:30 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Kyle Jamieson
Department of Computer Science, Princeton University

User demand for increasing amounts of wireless capacity continues to outpace supply, and so to meet this demand, significant progress has been made in new MIMO wireless physical layer techniques. Higher-performance systems now remain impractical largely only because their algorithms are extremely computationally demanding. For optimal performance, an amount of computation that increases at an exponential rate both with the number of users and with the data rate of each user is often required. The base station's computational capacity is thus becoming one of the key limiting factors on wireless capacity.

QuAMax is the first large MIMO cloud-based radio access network design to address this issue by leveraging quantum annealing on the problem. We have implemented QuAMax on the 2,031 qubit D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer, the state-of-the-art in the field. Our experimental results evaluate that implementation on real and synthetic MIMO channel traces, showing that 30 μs of compute time on the 2000Q can enable 48 user, 48 AP antenna BPSK communication at 20 dB SNR with a bit error rate of 10^{-6} and a 1,500 byte frame error rate of 10^{-4}.


Bio: Kyle Jamieson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University and Honorary Reader at University College London. His research focuses on building mobile and wireless systems for sensing, localization, and communication that cut across the boundaries of digital communications and networking. 

He received the B.S. (Mathematics, Computer Science), M.Eng. (Computer Science and Engineering), and Ph.D. (Computer Science, 2008) degrees in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then received a Starting Investigator fellowship from the European Research Council, a Google Faculty Research Award, and the ACM SIGMOBILE Early Career ("Rockstar") Award.