1. [Publications](/publications)
2. Design of a Standard-Compliant Real-Time Neural Receiver for 5G NR
 
 # Design of a Standard-Compliant Real-Time Neural Receiver for 5G NR

  ![Publication image](/sites/default/files/styles/wide/public/default_images/default.jpeg?itok=qUFsuJCP "Publication image")

 We detail the steps required to deploy a multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) neural receiver (NRX) in an actual cellular communication system. This raises several exciting research challenges, including the need for real-time inference and compatibility with the 5G NR standard. As the network configuration in a practical setup can change dynamically within milliseconds, we propose an adaptive NRX architecture capable of supporting dynamic modulation and coding scheme (MCS) configurations without the need for any re-training. This adaptivity comes at no additional inference cost and negligible loss in error-rate performance when compared to the state-of-the-art single-MCS NRX architecture. Furthermore, we optimize the latency of the neural network (NN) architecture to achieve inference times of less than 1 ms on an NVIDIA A100 GPU using the TensorRT inference library. These latency constraints effectively limit the size of the NN and we quantify the resulting signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) degradation as less than 0.7 dB when compared to the preliminary non-real-time NRX architecture. Finally, we explore the potential for site-specific adaptation of the receiver by investigating the required size of the training dataset and the number of fine-tuning iterations to optimize the NRX for specific radio environments using a ray tracing-based channel model. The resulting NRX is ready for deployment in a real-time 5G NR system and the source code including the TensorRT experiments is available online.



 ## Authors



Reinhard Wiesmayr (ETH Zurich)

[Sebastian Cammerer](/person/sebastian-cammerer)

[Fayçal Aït Aoudia ](/person/faycal-ait-aoudia)

[Jakob Hoydis](/person/jakob-hoydis)

Jakub Zakrzewski (NVIDIA)

[Alex Keller](/person/alex-keller)

 

 

 ## Publication Date



Monday, May 26, 2025

 

 ## Published in



[IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning for Communication and Network…](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11140048)

 

 ## Research Area



[Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning ](/research-area/machine-learning-artificial-intelligence)

[Telecommunications](/research-area/telecommunications)