A Novel 6G Dynamic Channel Map Based on a Hybrid Channel Model

In the sixth generation (6G) wireless communication networks, the device density, antenna number, and the complexity of communication scenarios will significantly increase, which brings great challenges for system design and network optimization. By obtaining channel information in advance, channel map has become a promising solution to these challenges in 6G era. However, conventional channel maps cannot be updated in time as physical environment changes. To solve the problem, a novel dynamic channel map (DCM) is proposed in this work. For DCM construction, we further present a ray tracing (RT) and geometric stochastic hybrid channel model (RT-GSHCM), which pre-constructs the DCM offline by RT and updates it online by geometry-based stochastic channel model (GBSM). By this way, the DCM can provide time-varying channel information and channel properties while matintaining accuracy. Next, a channel measurement campaign is conducted, and the measurement results are compared with the RT-GSHCM, RT, and GBSM. The comparison results validate the accuracy of DCM. Meanwhile, the time cost on DCM update is compared with that of conventional channel maps, illustrating the time-efficiency of DCM. Finally, important statistical channel properties of RT-GSHCM are further derived, analyzed, and compared under different configurations of interaction objects in physical environment.

DBU-OFDM: A Trainable Deep Block-Unitary OFDM Waveform for Integrated Sensing and Communication

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a dominant waveform in modern wireless systems, yet its high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and limited adaptability hinder efficient support for integrated communication and sensing. This paper proposes deep block-unitary precoded OFDM (DBU-OFDM), a structure-preserving learning framework that enables trainable waveform adaptation while preserving the DFT-based signal structure, pilot/null resource protection, and compatibility with low-complexity frequency-domain equalization. The proposed design restricts learning to a block-unitary transformation over data subcarriers and preserves pilot and null resources for structural compatibility. The transform is parameterized by recursive Householder reflections, ensuring strict unitarity as well as differentiable, numerically stable, and complexity-controllable implementation. Results show that DBU-OFDM achieves PAPR tails close to block-pilot DFT-s-OFDM while retaining comb-type pilots, improves communication reliability in frequency-selective fading via frequency-domain diversity, and enhances range and velocity estimation in direct sensing, especially in dimension-limited settings. Over-the-air USRP experiments and FPGA prototyping further verify its practical feasibility, demonstrating low error vector magnitude (EVM), clear PAPR reduction in real transmission, and hardware throughput up to 200~MS/s with microsecond-level latency. DBU-OFDM therefore offers a practical intermediate solution between conventional model-based OFDM waveforms and unconstrained neural transceivers for next-generation integrated communication and sensing systems.

Data-Model Co-Driven Continuous Channel Map Construction: A Perceptive Foundation for Embodied Intelligent Agents in 6G Networks

Future 6G networks will host massive numbers of embodied intelligent agents, which require real-time channel awareness over continuous-space for autonomous decision-making. By pre-obtaining location-specific channel state information (CSI), channel map can be served as a foundational world model for embodied intelligence to achieve wireless channel perception. However, acquiring CSI via measurements is costly, so in practice only sparse observations are available, leaving agents blind to channel conditions at unvisited locations. Meanwhile, purely model-driven channel maps can provide dense CSI but often yields unsatisfactory accuracy and robustness, while purely data-driven interpolation from sparse measurements is computationally prohibitive for real-time updates. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a data-model co-driven (DMcD) framework that performs a two-stage interpolation toward a space-time continuous channel map, First, a hybrid ray tracing and geometry-based channel model (H-RT/GBSM) is developed to capture dynamic scatterers, providing dense, time-variant channel properties that match measurement statistics as a physically consistent prior. Then, an inductive edge-conditioned graph neural network (InductE-GNN) fuses the prior with sparse measurements to perform real-time spatial interpolation, enabling rapid online adaptation without retraining, ensuring the synchronization with the dynamic physical reality. Evaluations with measured datasets show that the proposed DMcD framework significantly outperforms data-only and model-only baselines, providing accurate and queryable channel information for embodied intelligent agents.

Channel Extrapolation for MIMO Systems with the Assistance of Multi-path Information Induced from Channel State Information

Acquiring channel state information (CSI) through traditional methods, such as channel estimation, is increasingly challenging for the emerging sixth generation (6G) mobile networks due to high overhead. To address this issue, channel extrapolation techniques have been proposed to acquire complete CSI from a limited number of known CSIs. To improve extrapolation accuracy, environmental information, such as visual images or radar data, has been utilized, which poses challenges including additional hardware, privacy and multi-modal alignment concerns. To this end, this paper proposes a novel channel extrapolation framework by leveraging environment-related multi-path characteristics induced directly from CSI without integrating additional modalities. Specifically, we propose utilizing the multi-path characteristics in the form of power-delay profile (PDP), which is acquired using a CSI-to-PDP module. CSI-to-PDP module is trained in an AE-based framework by reconstructing the PDPs and constraining the latent low-dimensional features to represent the CSI. We further extract the total power & power-weighted delay of all the identified paths in PDP as the multi-path information. Building on this, we proposed a MAE architecture trained in a self-supervised manner to perform channel extrapolation. Unlike standard MAE approaches, our method employs separate encoders to extract features from the masked CSI and the multi-path information, which are then fused by a cross-attention module. Extensive simulations demonstrate that this framework improves extrapolation performance dramatically, with a minor increase in inference time (around 0.1 ms). Furthermore, our model shows strong generalization capabilities, particularly when only a small portion of the CSI is known, outperforming existing benchmarks.

MambaNet: Mamba-assisted Channel Estimation Neural Network With Attention Mechanism

This paper proposes a Mamba-assisted neural network framework incorporating self-attention mechanism to achieve improved channel estimation with low complexity for orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) waveforms, particularly for configurations with a large number of subcarriers. With the integration of customized Mamba architecture, the proposed framework handles large-scale subcarrier channel estimation efficiently while capturing long-distance dependencies among these subcarriers effectively. Unlike conventional Mamba structure, this paper implements a bidirectional selective scan to improve channel estimation performance, because channel gains at different subcarriers are non-causal. Moreover, the proposed framework exhibits relatively lower space complexity than transformer-based neural networks. Simulation results tested on the 3GPP TS 36.101 channel demonstrate that compared to other baseline neural network solutions, the proposed method achieves improved channel estimation performance with a reduced number of tunable parameters.

Large-Model AI for Near Field Beam Prediction: A CNN-GPT2 Framework for 6G XL-MIMO

The emergence of extremely large-scale antenna arrays (ELAA) in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, particularly in high-mobility scenarios, highlights the importance of near-field beam prediction. Unlike the conventional far-field assumption, near-field beam prediction requires codebooks that jointly sample the angular and distance domains, which leads to a dramatic increase in pilot overhead. Moreover, unlike the far- field case where the optimal beam evolution is temporally smooth, the optimal near-field beam index exhibits abrupt and nonlinear dynamics due to its joint dependence on user angle and distance, posing significant challenges for temporal modeling. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network-Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (CNN-GPT2) based near-field beam prediction framework. Specifically, an uplink pilot transmission strategy is designed to enable efficient channel probing through widebeam analog precoding and frequency-varying digital precoding. The received pilot signals are preprocessed and passed through a CNN-based feature extractor, followed by a GPT-2 model that captures temporal dependencies across multiple frames and directly predicts the near-field beam index in an end-to-end manner.

CKMDiff: A Generative Diffusion Model for CKM Construction via Inverse Problems with Learned Priors

Channel knowledge map (CKM) is a promising technology to enable environment-aware wireless communications and sensing with greatly enhanced performance, by offering location-specific channel prior information for future wireless networks. One fundamental problem for CKM-enabled wireless systems lies in how to construct high-quality and complete CKM for all locations of interest, based on only limited and noisy on-site channel knowledge data. This problem resembles the long-standing ill-posed inverse problem, which tries to infer from a set of limited and noisy observations the cause factors that produced them. By utilizing the recent advances of solving inverse problems with learned priors using generative artificial intelligence (AI), we propose CKMDiff, a conditional diffusion model that can be applied to perform various tasks for CKM constructions such as denoising, inpainting, and super-resolution, without having to know the physical environment maps or transceiver locations. Furthermore, we propose an environment-aware data augmentation mechanism to enhance the model's ability to learn implicit relations between electromagnetic propagation patterns and spatial-geometric features. Extensive numerical results are provided based on the CKMImageNet and RadioMapSeer datasets, which demonstrate that the proposed CKMDiff achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming various benchmark methods.

Low-Complexity Iterative Precoding Design for Near-field Multiuser Systems With Spatial Non-Stationarity

Extremely large antenna arrays (ELAA) are regarded as a promising technology for supporting sixth-generation (6G) networks. However, the large number of antennas significantly increases the computational complexity in precoding design, even for linearly regularized zero-forcing (RZF) precoding. To address this issue, a series of low-complexity iterative precoding are investigated. The main idea of these methods is to avoid matrix inversion of RZF precoding. Specifically, RZF precoding is equivalent to a system of linear equations that can be solved by fast iterative algorithms, such as random Kaczmarz (RK) algorithm. Yet, the performance of RK-based precoding algorithm is limited by the energy distributions of multiple users, which restricts its application in ELAA-assisted systems. To accelerate the RK-based precoding, we introduce the greedy random Kaczmarz (GRK)-based precoding by using the greedy criterion-based selection strategy. To further reduce the complexity of the GRK-based precoding, we propose a visibility region (VR)-based orthogonal GRK (VR-OGRK) precoding that leverages near-field spatial non-stationarity, which is characterized by the concept of VR. Next, by utilizing the information from multiple hyperplanes in each iteration, we extend the GRK-based precoding to the aggregation hyperplane Kaczmarz (AHK)-based pecoding algorithm, which further enhances the convergence rate. Building upon the AHK algorithm, we propose a VR-based orthogonal AHK (VR-OAHK) precoding to further reduce the computational complexity. Furthermore, the proposed iterative precoding algorithms are proven to converge to RZF globally at an exponential rate. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms achieve faster convergence and lower computational complexity than benchmark algorithms, and yield very similar performance to the RZF precoding.

An Efficient Pre-Processing Method for 6G Dynamic Ray-Tracing Channel Modeling

The ray-tracing is often employed in urban areas for channel modeling with high accuracy but encounters a substantial computational complexity for high mobility scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel pre-processing method for dynamic ray-tracing to reduce the computational burden in high-mobility scenarios by prepending the intersection judgment to the pre-processing stage. The proposed method generates an inter-visibility matrix that establishes visibility relationships among static objects in the environment considering the intersection judgment. Moreover, the inter-visibility matrix can be employed to create the inter-visibility table for mobile transmitters and receivers, which can improve the efficiency of constructing an image tree for the three-dimensional (3D) dynamic ray-tracing method. The results show that the proposed pre-processing method in dynamic ray-tracing has considerable time-saving compared with the traditional method while maintaining the same accuracy. The channel characteristics computed by the proposed method can well match to the channel measurements.

LinFormer: A Linear-based Lightweight Transformer Architecture For Time-Aware MIMO Channel Prediction

The emergence of 6th generation (6G) mobile networks brings new challenges in supporting high-mobility communications, particularly in addressing the issue of channel aging. While existing channel prediction methods offer improved accuracy at the expense of increased computational complexity, limiting their practical application in mobile networks. To address these challenges, we present LinFormer, an innovative channel prediction framework based on a scalable, all-linear, encoder-only Transformer model. Our approach, inspired by natural language processing (NLP) models such as BERT, adapts an encoder-only architecture specifically for channel prediction tasks. We propose replacing the computationally intensive attention mechanism commonly used in Transformers with a time-aware multi-layer perceptron (TMLP), significantly reducing computational demands. The inherent time awareness of TMLP module makes it particularly suitable for channel prediction tasks. We enhance LinFormer's training process by employing a weighted mean squared error loss (WMSELoss) function and data augmentation techniques, leveraging larger, readily available communication datasets. Our approach achieves a substantial reduction in computational complexity while maintaining high prediction accuracy, making it more suitable for deployment in cost-effective base stations (BS). Comprehensive experiments using both simulated and measured data demonstrate that LinFormer outperforms existing methods across various mobility scenarios, offering a promising solution for future wireless communication systems.