Unsupervised Deep Learning for Blind Multiuser Frequency Synchronization in OFDMA Uplink

In this paper, a novel unsupervised deep learning approach is proposed to tackle the multiuser frequency synchronization problem inherent in orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) uplink communications. The key idea lies in the use of the feed-forward deep neural network (FF-DNN) for multiuser interference (MUI) cancellation taking advantage of their strong classification capability. Basically, the proposed FF-DNN consists of two essential functional layers. One is called carrier-frequency-offsets (CFOs) classification layer that is responsible for identifying the users' CFO range, and another is called MUI-cancellation layer responsible for joint multiuser detection (MUD) and frequency synchronization. By such means, the proposed FF-DNN approach showcases remarkable MUI-cancellation performances without the need of multiuser CFO estimation. In addition, we also exhibit an interesting phenomenon occurred at the CFO-classification stage, where the CFO-classification performance get improved exponentially with the increase of the number of users. This is called multiuser diversity gain in the CFO-classification stage, which is carefully studied in this paper.