Uplink MIMO Detection Using Ising Machines: A Multi-Stage Ising Approach

Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) signal detection is central to nearly every state-of-the-art communication system, and enhancements in error performance and computational complexity of MIMO detection would significantly enhance data rate and latency experienced by the users. Theoretically, the optimal MIMO detector is the maximum-likelihood (ML) MIMO detector; however, due to its extremely high complexity, it is not feasible for large real-world communication systems. Over the past few years, algorithms based on physics-inspired Ising solvers, like Coherent Ising machines and Quantum Annealers, have shown significant performance improvements for the MIMO detection problem. However, the current state-of-the-art is limited to low-order modulations or systems with few users. In this paper, we propose an adaptive multi-stage Ising machine-based MIMO detector that extends the performance gains of physics-inspired computation to Large and Massive MIMO systems with a large number of users and very high modulation schemes (up to 256-QAM). We enhance our previously proposed delta Ising formulation and develop a heuristic that adaptively optimizes the performance and complexity of our proposed method. We perform extensive micro-benchmarking to optimize several free parameters of the system and evaluate our methods’ BER and spectral efficiency for Large and Massive MIMO systems (up to 32 users and 256-QAM modulation).