A Novel Average Autoencoder-based Amplify-and-Forward Relay Networks with Hardware Impairments

In this paper, we propose a novel Average autoencoder (AE)-based amplify-and-forward (AF) relay networks impacted by the I/Q imbalance (IQI) and additional hardware impairments (AHI), where the source and destination nodes are equipped with neural network (NN)-based encoder and decoder, while a conventional AF relay node assists the transmission. The average AE employs multiple small NN-based decoders at the destination node, each decoding a soft probabilistic output that is averaged to obtain the final soft probabilistic output at the destination node. By considering multiple small NN decoders, we reduce the implementation complexity significantly while improving the performance compared to the AE with a single large but NN-based decoder. Within this Average AE framework, we propose a coded modulation design (CMD) with zero-forcing-based IQI compensation that considers the availability of the channel state information (CSI) and IQI knowledge. However, the IQI and CSI need to be estimated separately. Thus, we also propose a CMD with no IQI compensation that requires only the CSI knowledge. Finally, we propose a differential CMD that removes the necessity of both the CSI and IQI knowledge. Under low signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio regimes, we show that the proposed Average AE outperforms the optimal maximum likelihood detector by considerable margin.