SpecEES: Collaborative Research: Advancing the Wireless Spectral Frontier with Quantum-Enabled Computational Techniques (QENeTs)

近年来，用户对不断增加的无线容量的需求继续超过供应。为了满足这一需求，在设计新的无线技术方面已经取得了重大进展，但即使是更高性能的系统在很大程度上仍然是不切实际的，因为它们的技术对计算的要求非常高。 为了获得最佳性能，这些技术通常需要随着用户数量和每个用户的数据速率以指数速率增加的计算量。基站的计算能力正在成为无线容量的限制因素。 量子计算技术（QENeTs）旨在通过利用量子计算来克服以前的计算限制，从而改变当前的研究格局，使无线网络性能达到新的水平，最终结果是将量子计算纳入未来的无线蜂窝网络标准。 在先进蜂窝技术的背景下，QENet将有助于提高网络性能，并实现密集部署中Wi-Fi等无线局域网技术的共存。 该项目将设计大量新的通信接收器解码算法，这些算法可以在今天和明天的量子退火机上执行，以及即将推出的量子门模型计算机的早期原型。QENets最大似然解码器问题是量子计算在无线网络中的第一次应用，也是第一次在量子计算机中尝试完全复杂的现实世界问题。 这些方法将在真实的硬件上进行测试，并与最知名的经典方法进行基准测试。除了频谱效率，该项目还将考虑量子技术如何提高大规模多输入/多输出（MIMO）算法的能效，无论是在电池寿命至关重要的移动的手机上，还是在基础设施方面，降低基站功率的能力为网络运营商带来了显着的成本节约效益。 QENeTs项目将为政府和工业研究环境做出贡献，因为合作机构之一的大学空间研究协会（USRA）已与美国国家航空航天局（NASA）和谷歌签署了一项联合空间法案协议，就量子计算的好处进行合作研究。QENeTs将通过在USRA和NASA艾姆斯研究中心的暑期实习经验进一步支持研究生教育。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In recent years, user demand for increasing amounts of wireless capacity continues to outpace supply. To meet this demand, significant progress has been made in designing new wireless technologies, but even higher-performance systems remain impractical largely because their techniques are extremely computationally demanding. For the best performance, these techniques generally require an amount of computation that increases at an exponential rate both with the number of users and with the data rate of each user. The base station's computational capacity is becoming the limiting factor on wireless capacity. Quantum-Enabled Computational Techniques (QENeTs) aims to transform the current research landscape by leveraging quantum computation to overcome previous computational limitations, enabling new levels of wireless network performance, with the eventual outcome of incorporating quantum computation into tomorrow's wireless cellular networking standards. In the context of advanced cellular technologies, QENeTs will contribute techniques to both improve network performance and enable co-existence of wireless local area networking technologies such as Wi-Fi in dense deployments. The project will design a multitude of new communications receiver decoding algorithms that are amenable to execution on today's and tomorrow's quantum annealers, as well as the early prototypes of forthcoming quantum gate model computers. The QENeTs maximum-likelihood decoder problems are the first application of quantum computing to wireless networks, and the first time that such real-world problems have been attempted in quantum computers in their full complexity. These methods will be tested on real hardware and benchmarked against the best known classical approaches. In addition to spectral efficiency, the project will also consider how quantum-enabled techniques can improve the energy efficiency of massive multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) algorithms, both on the mobile handset where battery life is key, as well as on the infrastructure side, where the ability to power-down base stations reaps significant cost savings benefits for the network operator. The QENeTs project will contribute to the governmental and industrial research environments, as the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), one of the collaborating institutions, has entered into a joint Space Act Agreement with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Google to conduct collaborative research on the benefits of quantum computing for a range of challenging applications. QENeTs will further support graduate student education through summer internship experiences at USRA and the NASA Ames Research Center.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.