Quantum-Classical Autoencoder Architectures for End-to-End Radio Communication

End-to-end radio communication needs to be optimized against noisy channel conditions and other distortion effects. This paper presents a novel concept, a set of hybrid quantum-classical autoencoder architectures with a comprehensive feasibility study using standard encoded radio signals, to evaluate quantum neural network design requirements for the radio context. The hybrid scenarios include single-sided, i.e., quantum encoder (transmitter) or quantum decoder (receiver), as well as fully quantum radio channel autoencoder (transmitter-receiver) systems. We provide detailed formulas for each scenario and validate our model through an extensive set of simulations. Our results demonstrate model robustness and adaptability. Supporting experiments are conducted utilizing 4 and 16 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation schemes and we expect that the model is adaptable to more general encoding schemes. We explore model performance against both additive white Gaussian noise and Rayleigh fading models. Our numerical findings highlight the importance of designing efficient quantum neural network architectures for meeting application performance constraints – including data re-uploading methods, encoding schemes, and core layer structures.