X-ResQ: Reverse Annealing for Quantum MIMO Detection with Flexible Parallelism

Quantum Annealing (QA)-accelerated MIMO detection is an emerging research approach in the context of NextG wireless networks. The opportunity is to enable large MIMO systems and thus improve wireless performance. The approach aims to leverage QA to expedite the computation required for theoretically optimal but computationally-demanding Maximum Likelihood detection to overcome the limitations of the currently deployed linear detectors. This paper presents X-ResQ, a QA-based MIMO detector system featuring fine-grained quantum task parallelism that is uniquely enabled by the Reverse Annealing (RA) protocol. Unlike prior designs, X-ResQ has many desirable system properties for a parallel QA detector and has effectively improved detection performance as more qubits are assigned. In our evaluations on a state-of-the-art quantum annealer, fully parallel X-ResQ achieves near-optimal throughput (over 10 bits/s/Hz) for 4×6 MIMO with 16-QAM using six levels of parallelism with 240 qubits and 220 μs QA compute time, achieving 2.5–5× gains compared against other tested detectors. For more comprehensive evaluations, we implement and evaluate X-ResQ in the non-quantum digital setting. This non-quantum X-ResQ demonstration showcases the potential to realize ultra-large 1024×1024 MIMO, significantly outperforming other MIMO detectors, including the state-of-the-art RA detector classically implemented in the same way.