RIS-Assisted Multi-User MIMO Systems Exploiting Extreme Learning Machine
RIS-Assisted Multi-User MIMO Systems Exploiting Extreme Learning Machine
Received 29 March 2023, accepted 18 April 2023, date of publication 12 May 2023, date of current version 18 May 2023.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3275755
INDEX TERMS Extreme learning machine, intelligent surface, machine learning, massive MIMO, multi-
layer perceptron.
where first stage of the proposed CSI estimation approach applications, which are observed in [20], [21], and [22].
uses the traditional uplink training method to determine the In [20], the ELM is trained offline first with the training
direct MIMO channel between the access point (AP) and data and then deployed online. However, the ELM algorithm
the users and the second stage of the proposed approach can be both trained and deployed online, which is demon-
estimates the AP-RIS channel and the RIS-user channel. strated in [21]. Least square (LS)-based channel estimation is
In [7], the CE involves estimation of the direction-of-arrival conducted first and the symbols are equalized, based on the
(DoA) and path gains. Channel parameters such as angle estimated channel. Then the online trained ELM is used to
of departures (AoDs) of BS-RIS channels, angle of arrivals refine the equalization process [22]. Therefore, in this paper,
(AoAs) of the RIS-user end channels, angle differences and the online ELM algorithm is explored for designing RIS-
product of the path gains in a RIS-mmWave-MIMO system MIMO receiver. The traditional ELM, implemented in the
are estimated in [8]. In [9], the CE problem is formulated above studies, is not immune to the random choice of the
as DoA estimation problem. In [10], maximum achievable hidden layer size. It will not provide satisfactory performance
rate of the RIS-MIMO system is attempted to obtain by if the hidden layer size is too small or large. Therefore,
means of the proposed CE and the passive beamforming [11] to address this issue, an incremental constructive approach
schemes. The reflection coefficients of the RIS are consid- for the ELM algorithm-based method is presented.
ered to be pre-designed and the effective superposed channel
is estimated. The beamformer is designed on the basis of B. CONTRIBUTION OF THE PAPER
the estimated superposed channel. In [12], minimum mean In an incremental ELM (I-ELM) algorithm, the hidden neu-
square error (MMSE)-based approaches are studied for CE rons are randomly chosen. Based on given specifications,
and the design of phase shifts and equalizer. Estimation of it is able to adjust the hidden layer size and provide descent
the composite channel, which is the direct channel between prediction performance. Therefore, an I-ELM algorithm is
the user and BS and cascaded channel among the user, RIS proposed in this paper to design a receiver for an RIS-
and BS, is also analyzed in the study. muMIMO system. The main contributions of the paper is
With the increase of the number of users, complexities summarized as follows.
in network performance analysis will also increase. Diffi- • An I-ELM receiver is proposed for an RIS-assisted
culties in ensuring QoS demands of the users will also rise. muMIMO systems with a single BS, a single RIS unit
Machine learning (ML)-based methods is seen as a potential and several users.
tool for the future network systems, including RIS-based • The proposed receiver is compared to the MMSE, the
networks [13]. A deep learning (DL) framework, presented traditional ELM and the multilayer perceptron (MLP)
in [14], consists of a twin convolutional neural network receivers in terms of throughput performance for a
(CNN) architecture that estimates both the direct link and cas- given RIS-muMIMO system configuration. Further-
caded link channels by analyzing the received pilot signals. more, comparative studies are also conducted for differ-
The research work conducted in [15] uses a three-stage train- ent BS antennas and RIS elements. It is shown that the
ing approach with deep neural network (DNN) to estimate proposed I-ELM provide satisfactory performance with
the CSI of direct communication link as well as the cascaded respect to the other receivers.
CSI for both the active and inactive RIS components. A deep The paper is organized as follows. The RIS-muMIMO sys-
residual learning-based CSI estimation approach is presented tem model and receiver design with traditional mathematical
in [16]. A convolutional neural network architecture is used approach in section II. ELM based receiver is discussed in
that utilizes the spatial properties of the noisy channel matri- section III. Architecture of I-ELM is described in section IV.
ces as well as the cumulative behavior of the noise. In [17], the Simulation results are provided in V. The paper is concluded
training of a deep neural network with the aid of unsupervised with section VI.
learning technique is performed for designing passive beam-
forming [11] matrices in an RIS-enabled network system. II. SYSTEM MODEL OF RIS-muMIMO
The joint design of the transmit beamformer and phase shift In this paper, an uplink communication system is consid-
matrix is performed by means of deep reinforcement learning ered, as shown in Fig. 1, where the single BS contains NR
(DRL) algorithm in [18]. The transmit beamforming and antennas, the RIS unit contains M elements and K users
phase shift matrices are both said to be obtained concurrently contain NT antennas. The user-base station direct link, the
by the proposed approach at the neural network’s output. user-RIS link and the RIS-base station link are denoted by
However, DL-based approaches require complicated param- H d,k ∈ CNR ×NT , Fk ∈ CM ×NT and G ∈ CNR ×M respec-
eter adjustment through backpropagation algorithm, which tively. These channel matrices follow Rayleigh distribution.
can be expensive in terms of duration. In such case, extreme A total of N subcarrier frequencies are used for transmitting
learning machine (ELM) can be implemented. data symbols, where Nk = N K orthogonal subcarriers are
An ELM-based receiver is designed in [19] for a allocated to each users. Cyclic prefix-orthogonal frequency
light-emitting diode (LED)-based MIMO system. The division multiplexing (CP-OFDM) protocol with 120 kHz of
ELM receiver is constructed on real domain base. ELM- subcarrier spacing is followed by the system. The channel
based approach can also be extended to complex domain coded bits are digitally modulated, based on the normalized
47130 VOLUME 11, 2023
M. R. Mahmood et al.: RIS-Assisted Multi-User MIMO Systems Exploiting ELM
ρ,k .
Ĥ k,LS = Y ρ,k X −1 (5)
To minimize the mean square error (MSE) of the LS chan-
nel estimation, a Bayesian-based MMSE estimation method
can be used [25], [26], which gives the following equation.
FIGURE 1. System model of RIS-assisted mu-MIMO system.
Ĥ k = σ 2 (σ 2 + σk2 )−1 Ĥ k,LS . (6)
Ĥ k,LS Ĥ k,LS
Here, H k = DFT (H d,k + G8Fk ), H i = DFT (H d,i + III. PRELIMINARY KNOWLEDGE OF THE ELM
G8Fi ), X k = DFT (xk ) and X i = DFT (xi ). In this paper, ALGORITHM
the composite channel, Ĥ k , is aimed to be estimated for the In this section, a three-layered traditional extreme learning
user k by using the reference symbols (transmitted with the architecture is described, as shown in Fig. 2. The input layer,
data symbols), which is known at the receiving end (i.e. base hidden layer and output layer contains NR , L and NT neurons
station). respectively. The ELM is assigned with random input weights
TRAINING PHASE
• Random generation of W k and bk .
• Determination of Dρ,k from (11).
• Determination of β k from (12).
TESTING PHASE
• Determination of Dk from (13).
• Estimation of X ELM ,k from (14).
FIGURE 3. Block diagram of the training phase of I-ELM receiver. This phase of the proposed receiver continues until ξρ and Li criteria are
met.
handling of the hidden layer size and consequently deliver Algorithm 2 I-ELM-Based Receiver Mechanism
satisfactory prediction performance. Training pilot symbol sets T k = Y ρ,k , X ρ,k for user k,
activation function a(.), initial hidden layer neurons Li ,
V. SIMULATION RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS maximum hidden layer neurons Lmax and ξρ = ξρ,exp .
In this section, the simulation results obtained for the
RIS-muMIMO system with center frequency of 30 GHz is TRAINING PHASE
presented. The spacing among the subcarrier frequencies is • Initialization of W k,i and bk,i for given Li .
120 kHz. Four users (K = 4, with NT = 2 transmitting • Computation of β k,i from (15) and (16).
antenna each), single BS with NR = 64 and single RIS unit • Estimation of X I −ELM ,ρ,k,i from (17) and (18).
with M = 64 are initially considered for the study. The • Determination of ξ between X ρ,k and X I −ELM ,ρ,k,i .
number of total subcarrier is N = 960, which is divided • While Li ≤ Lmax and ξρ ≥ ξρ,exp
equally among the 4 users. In other words, the number – Li is expanded to Li+1 for adding single hidden layer
of allocated subcarrier for each user is Nk = 240. Low- neuron each time.
density parity check (LDPC) with 1/2 code rate is applied – Expansion of W k,i and bk,i to W k,i+1 and
to the data bits. The modulation format is elected to be bk,i+1 for the newly added hidden layer neuron.
16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM). The signal-
2
– Computation of β k,i+1 by following (15) and
k| ]
to-noise ratio is defined as E[|x
σ2
. The ELM algorithms (both (16).
traditional and proposed) are trained with the transmitted – Estimation of X I −ELM ,ρ,k,i+1 for the newly deter-
and received symbols (corresponding to the user k) at one mined β k,i+1 according to (17)
OFDM symbol time, out of 14 OFDM symbol times. Acti- and (18) and computation of ξρ between X ρ,k
vation function tanh is chosen for the hidden layer of both and X I −ELM ,ρ,k,i+1 .
of the ELM receivers. The input weights and the biases are TESTING PHASE
assigned by random complex numbers within [−10−2 , 10−2 ].
• Given, Lnew , W k,new ∈ CLnew ×NR , bk,new ∈ CLnew ×1
This interval is chosen such that the weight and the bias
and β k,new .
values fall within the activation function’s region of con-
– Dk,new = a(W k,new Y k + bk,new ).
vergence [22]. Based on the study conducted in [27], the
– X I −ELM ,k,new = β Tk,new Dk,new .
number of hidden layer neurons in the traditional ELM is
considered to be L = max(NR , NT ). In case of I-ELM
receiver, the initial hidden layer size Li and the maximum
number of hidden layer neurons, i.e. Lmax , are considered to
be equal to 10 and max(NR , NT ) respectively. The expected A. ANALYSIS OF THROUGHPUT PERFORMANCES
minimum MSE value ξρ,exp for I-ELM receiver is chosen to The performance of the proposed I-ELM receiver is com-
be 0.01. pared to that of the MMSE, traditional ELM and MLP
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and G. K. Karagiannidis, ‘‘Residual compensation-based extreme learn- received the B.Sc. degree in physics, the M.Sc.
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engineering from the Aristotle University of Thes-
saloniki, in 2011. He joined the Department of
M. REZWANUL MAHMOOD received the B.S. Physics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in 2013, where he is currently
degree in electrical and electronic engineering an Associate Professor. He is the Director of the ELEDIA@AUTH and a
from East West University, Dhaka, Bangladesh, Laboratory Member of the ELEDIA Research Center Network. He is the
in 2017. He is currently pursuing the M.S. degree author of the book Emerging Evolutionary Algorithms for Antennas and
in electrical and electronic engineering with Wireless Communications (The Institution of Engineering and Technology,
North South University, Dhaka. He is a Research 2021). His research interests include antenna and microwave structures
Assistant with North South University. He has design, evolutionary algorithms, wireless communications, and semantic
published few papers in reputed journals and web technologies. He is a member of the IEICE, the Greek Physics Society,
international conferences. His research interests the Technical Chamber of Greece, and the Greek Computer Society. He is
include future wireless networks, the Internet the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Telecom open access journal (MDPI).
of Things, and machine learning. He is serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ANTENNAS AND
PROPAGATION, IEEE ACCESS, and IEEE OPEN JOURNAL OF THE COMMUNICATION
SOCIETY. He is serving as the IEEE Greece Section Secretary.
MOHAMMAD ABDUL MATIN (Senior Member,
IEEE) received the B.Sc. degree in electrical and
electronic engineering from BUET, Bangladesh,
the M.Sc. degree in digital communication from
Loughborough University, U.K., and the Ph.D.
degree in wireless communication from Newcastle
University, U.K. He has been a Professor with the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineer-
ing, North South University (NSU), since 2008.
He has published over 120 peer-reviewed journals
and conference papers. He is the author/editor of 17 academic books and
21 book chapters. He serves as a member for the Editorial Board for
several international journals, including IEEE Communications Magazine
and IET Wireless Sensor Systems. He has received a number of prizes and
scholarships, including the Best Student Prize (Loughborough University),
Commonwealth Scholarship, and Overseas Research Scholarship (ORS)
conferred by the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Principals (CVCP) in
the U.K.