Deep learning based adaptive modulation and coding for uplink multi-user SIMO transmissions in IEEE 802.11ax WLANs.

The IEEE 802.11ax standard defined a set of new specifications to improve spectrum efficiency, power efficiency, and reliability of future wireless local area networks (WLANs). Among these specifications, the uplink multi-user multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) remedies the uplink shortcomings of existing WLANs and enables high-efficiency uplink transmissions. This paper considers the problem of adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) for uplink MU-single-input, multiple-output (MU-SIMO) in the upcoming WLANs. Our target is to select the appropriate modulation and coding scheme (MCS) for the existing users so as to maximize the throughput and at the same time guarantee that all users can satisfy a frame error constraint. We adopt a deep learning approach to tackle this problem. We propose to let the access point (AP) leverage the estimated channel state information (CSI) of all users along with the estimated noise standard deviation as the input features to a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) that is trained to perform AMC. Simulation results reveal that the proposed DCNN for the uplink MU-SIMO AMC outperforms rival machine learning techniques such as fully-connected deep neural network (DNN), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), support vector machines (SVM), Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB), and random forest (RF) in terms of the throughput and the frame error rate (FER). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]