Overcoming the conventional trade-off between throughput and bit error rate (BER) performance, versus computational complexity is a long-term challenge for uplink Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) detection in base station design for the cellular 5G New Radio roadmap, as well as in next generation wireless local area networks. In this work, we present ParaMax, a MIMO detector architecture that for the first time brings to bear physics-inspired parallel tempering algorithmic techniques [28, 50, 67] on this class of problems. ParaMax can achieve near optimal maximum-likelihood (ML) throughput performance in the Large MIMO regime, Massive MIMO systems where the base station has additional RF chains, to approach the number of base station antennas, in order to support even more parallel spatial streams. ParaMax is able to achieve a near ML-BER performance up to 160 × 160 and 80 × 80 Large MIMO for low-order modulations such as BPSK and QPSK, respectively, only requiring less than tens of processing elements. With respect to Massive MIMO systems, in 12 × 24 MIMO with 16-QAM at SNR 16 dB, ParaMax achieves 330 Mbits/s near-optimal system throughput with 4--8 processing elements per subcarrier, which is approximately 1.4× throughput than linear detector-based Massive MIMO systems.

We present the mapping of a class of simplified air traffic management problems (strategic conflict resolution) to quadratic unconstrained Boolean optimization problems. The mapping is performed through an original representation of the conflict-resolution problem in terms of a conflict graph, where the nodes of the graph represent flights and the edges represent a potential conflict between flights. The representation allows a natural decomposition of a real-world instance related to wind-optimal trajectories over the Atlantic Ocean into smaller subproblems that can be discretized and are amenable to be programmed in quantum annealers. In this paper, we tested the new programming techniques, and we benchmark the hardness of the instances using both classical solvers and the D-Wave 2X and D-Wave 2000Q quantum chip. The preliminary results show that for reasonable modeling choices, the most challenging subproblems which are programmable in the current devices are solved to optimality with 99% of probability within a second of annealing time.