Learning Distributed Neural Network-Based Beam Codebooks on FPGAs: Adapting to Unevenly Distributed Users in mmWave Massive MIMO IoT System With Hardware Acceleration

Millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is one of the most promising technologies from 5G-based Internet of Things (IoT) to future wireless communication-based IoT, which usually relies on beamforming codebooks for data transmission. However, traditional codebooks often consist of numerous narrow beams, which causes substantial training overhead. Although centralized machine learning-based methods can address this issue to some extent, they overlook minority IoT devices scattered across various areas, which is vital for the coverage equity of the environmental adaptive codebook and the optimal average achievable rate. To circumvent the problem, we propose a distributed learning (DL) framework for codebook design in mmWave massive MIMO systems with uneven user distribution. Specifically, the user channel set is first divided into subsets by pre-classification based on the power responses of the featured combining vectors from different subregions. Then, a novel DL architecture processes these subsets, each assigned to different baseband processing boards (BPBs) in building baseband units, alleviating the centralized machine learning burden on the active antenna unit (AAU) or its directly connected BPB. Meanwhile, the current algorithms lack the hardware perspective or only implement the inference stage of the model. Thus, we deploy an FPGA-adapted DL-based codebook training prototype that runs on FPGA, which fully explores the “Backward-While-Forward" strategy for data reuse in the forward and backward passes. Simulation validates the effectiveness of distributed learning. Notably, the FPGA implementation on the embedded-level board outperforms consumer-grade CPU and GPU in terms of both latency and energy efficiency.