Iterative Quantum-Assisted Multi-User Detection for Multi-Carrier Interleave Division Multiple Access Systems

With the proliferation of smart-phones and tablet PCs, the data rates of wireless communications have been soaring. Hence, the need for power-efficient communications relying on low-complexity multiple-stream detectors has become more pressing than ever. As a remedy, in this paper we design low-complexity soft-input soft-output quantum-assisted multi-user detectors (QMUD), which may be conveniently incorporated into state-of-the-art iterative receivers. Our design relies on extrinsic information transfer charts. Our QMUDs are then employed in multi-carrier interleave-division multiple-access (MC-IDMA) systems, which are investigated in the context of different channel code rate and spreading factor pairs, whilst fixing the total bandwidth requirement. One of our QMUDs is found to operate within 0.5 dB of the classical maximum a posteriori probability MUD after three iterations between the MUD and the decoders, while requiring only half its complexity, at a BER of 10^-5 in the uplink of a rank-deficient MC-IDMA system relying on realistic imperfect channel estimation at the receiver, while supporting 14 users transmitting QPSK symbols.