Quantum-Aided Processing for Classical Communication Signals: Progress and Outlook

With the rapid development of communication technology, communication widely affects all aspects of human life, and the ever increasing user volume sets high level requirements on the connection density and spectrum efficiency of communication systems. However, the signal processing method in classical communication faces a problem of mutual restriction between communication performance and computing complexity, which makes the promotion and application of related communication technologies extremely limited. Quantum computing, as a new computing paradigm following the principles of quantum mechanics to perform computing, can reach a much lower computing complexity compared to classical algorithms on particular problems, paving a new way for solving the problem of classical communication signal processing. Hence, in this paper we combed and analyzed the related research on the quantum processing of classical communication signals. We summarizes the quantum computing method involved in the quantum processing of classical communication signals in chronological order, and introduces related methods in detail towards different solved problems, namely, the channel estimation, data detection and multi-user detection. In addition, the paper makes a prospect for the further use of quantum computing.