Hardware Implementation of Task-based Quantization in Multi-user Signal Recovery

Quantization plays a critical role in digital signal processing systems, allowing the representation of continuous amplitude signals with a finite number of bits. However, accurately representing signals requires a large number of quantization bits, which causes severe cost, power consumption, and memory burden. A promising way to address this issue is task-based quantization. By exploiting the task information for the overall system design, task-based quantization can achieve satisfying performance with low quantization costs. In this work, we apply task-based quantization to multi-user signal recovery and present a hardware prototype implementation. The prototype consists of a tailored configurable combining board, and a software-based processing and demonstration system. Through experiments, we verify that with proper design, the task-based quantization achieves a reduction of 25 fold in memory by reducing from 16 receivers with 16 bits each to 2 receivers with 5 bits each, without compromising signal recovery performance.