Hybrid Neural/Traditional OFDM Receiver with Learnable Decider

Abstract: Deep learning (DL) methods have emerged as promising solutions for enhancing receiver performance in wireless orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, offering significant improvements over traditional estimation and detection techniques. However, DL-based receivers often face challenges such as poor generalization to unseen channel conditions and difficulty in effectively tracking rapid channel fluctuations. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a hybrid receiver architecture that integrates the strengths of both traditional and neural receivers. The core innovation is a discriminator neural network trained to dynamically select the optimal receiver whether it is the traditional or DL-based receiver according on the received OFDM block characteristics. This discriminator is trained using labeled pilot signals that encode the comparative performance of both receivers. By including anomalous channel scenarios in training, the proposed hybrid receiver achieves robust performance, effectively overcoming the generalization issues inherent in standalone DL approaches.