An Introduction to Deep Learning for the Physical Layer

We present and discuss several novel applications of deep learning for the physical layer. By interpreting a communi- cations system as an autoencoder, we develop a fundamental new way to think about communications system design as an end-to- end reconstruction task that seeks to jointly optimize transmitter and receiver components in a single process. We show how this idea can be extended to networks of multiple transmitters and receivers and present the concept of radio transformer networks as a means to incorporate expert domain knowledge in the machine learning model. Lastly, we demonstrate the application of convolutional neural networks on raw IQ samples for mod- ulation classification which achieves competitive accuracy with respect to traditional schemes relying on expert features. This paper is concluded with a discussion of open challenges and areas for future investigation in a single process. We show how this idea can be extended to networks of multiple transmitters and receivers and present the concept of radio transformer networks as a means to incorporate expert domain knowledge in the machine learning model. Lastly, we demonstrate the application of convolutional neural networks on raw IQ samples for mod- ulation classification which achieves competitive accuracy with respect to traditional schemes relying on expert features. This paper is concluded with a discussion of open challenges and areas for future investigation