GNN-Assisted BiG-AMP: Joint Channel Estimation and Data Detection for Massive MIMO Receiver

In this paper, we develop a graph neural network (GNN)-assisted bilinear inference approach to enhance the receiver performance of the MIMO system through message passing-based joint channel estimation and data detection (JCD). Specifically, based on the bilinear generalized approximate message passing (BiG-AMP) framework and conditional correlation of signal, we propose a GNN-assisted BiG-AMP (GNN-BiGAMP) approach, which integrates a GNN module into the data-detection-loop to compensate the inaccurate marginal likelihood approximation. By leveraging the coupling between the channel and received symbols, a bilinear GNN-assisted BiG-AMP (BiGNN-BiGAMP) JCD receiver is further proposed. This method incorporates two GNNs with similar graph representation into the bilinear posterior estimation loops, which not only compensates for approximation errors but also alleviates performance loss due to premature variance convergence, thereby enhancing the receiver performance significantly. To fully exploit the supervised information from channel estimation and data detection, we propose a multitask learning based training scheme, which coordinates GNNs with different tasks in two loops. Simulation results show that our proposed GNN-assisted JCD receivers significantly outperform other JCD counterparts in terms of both channel estimation and data detection.