The rise of 5G and beyond systems has fuelled research in merging machine learning with wireless communications to achieve cognitive radios. However, the portability and limited power supply of radio frequency devices limits engineers' ability to combine them with powerful predictive models. This hinders the ability to support advanced 5G applications such as device-to-device (D2D) communication and dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS). This challenge has inspired a wave of research in energy efficient machine learning hardware with low computational and area overhead. In particular, hardware implementations of the delayed feedback reservoir (DFR) model show promising results for meeting these constraints while achieving high accuracy in cognitive radio applications. This thesis answers two research questions surrounding the applicability of FPGA DFR systems for DSS. First, can a DFR network implemented on an FPGA run faster and with lower power than a purely software approach? Second, can the system be implemented efficiently on an edge device running at less than 10 watts?
Two systems are proposed that prove FPGA DFRs can achieve these feats: a mixed-signal circuit, followed by a high-level synthesis circuit. The implementations execute up to 58 times faster, and operate at more than 90% lower power than the software models. Furthermore, the lowest recorded average power of 0.130 watts proves that these approaches meet typical edge device constraints. When validated on the NARMA10 benchmark, the systems achieve a normalized error of 0.21 compared to state-of-the-art error values of 0.15. In a DSS task, the systems are able to predict spectrum occupancy with up to 0.87 AUC in high noise, multiple input, multiple output (MIMO) antenna configurations compared to 0.99 AUC in other works. At the end of this thesis, the trade-offs between the approaches are analyzed, and future directions for advancing this study are proposed. / Master of Science / The rise of 5G and beyond systems has fuelled research in merging machine learning with wireless communications to achieve cognitive radios. However, the portability and limited power supply of radio frequency devices limits engineers' ability to combine them with powerful predictive models. This hinders the ability to support advanced 5G and internet-of-things (IoT) applications. This challenge has inspired a wave of research in energy efficient machine learning hardware with low computational and area overhead. In particular, hardware implementations of a low complexity neural network model, called the delayed feedback reservoir, show promising results for meeting these constraints while achieving high accuracy in cognitive radio applications. This thesis answers two research questions surrounding the applicability of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) delayed feedback reservoir systems for wireless communication applications. First, can this network implemented on an FPGA run faster and with lower power than a purely software approach? Second, can the network be implemented efficiently on an edge device running at less than 10 watts? Two systems are proposed that prove the FPGA networks can achieve these feats. The systems demonstrate lower power consumption and latency than the software models. Additionally, the systems maintain high accuracy on traditional neural network benchmarks and wireless communications tasks. The second implementation is further demonstrated in a software-defined radio architecture. At the end of this thesis, the trade-offs between the approaches are analyzed, and future directions for advancing this study are proposed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/110780 |
| Date | 14 June 2022 |
| Creators | Shears, Osaze Yahya |
| Contributors | Electrical and Computer Engineering, Yi, Yang, Paul, JoAnn Mary, Patterson, Cameron D. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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