An Improved Data-Driven Decision Feedback Receiver via Deep Unfolding

The proposed decision feedback receiver (DFR) is an end-to-end data-driven iterative receiver, and the performance gain is achieved from iterations. However, the mismatch problem between the training set and test set exists in the DFR training, and thus performance degradation, slow convergence speed, and oscillation are introduced. On the other hand, deep unfolding using parameter sharing is a practical method to reduce the model parameter number and improve the training efficiency, but the problem whether the parameter sharing will cause performance degradation is rarely considered. In this work, we generally discuss and analyze these two problems, and solution to solve the problem or conditions that the problem no longer exists is then introduced. We give the improvements to address the mismatch problem in the DFR, and thus we propose an improved-DFR via deep unfolding. The improved-DFRs with and without parameter sharing, namely, DFR-I and DFR-IS, are both developed with low computation complexity and model complexity and can be executed by parallel processing. Besides, the practical training tricks and performance analysis including computation complexity and model complexity are given. In the experiments, the improved-DFRs outperform the DFR in various scenarios, in terms of convergence speed and symbol error rate. The simulation results also show that the DFR-IS is easier to train, and the slight performance loss can be reduced by increasing model complexity, in comparison to DFR-I.