Sequential and Generative Models for Vehicular Distributed MIMO Channel Prediction

Vehicular communication is a key 6G use case requiring reliable and high-capacity connectivity under fast mobility and highly time-varying propagation conditions. However, large-scale vehicular channel estimation is costly and limited, impacting system-level performance of vehicular communications, and realistic channel prediction models are needed. This paper proposes a vehicular channel prediction framework based on real measured urban channels collected through a dedicated measurement campaign using the MaMIMOSA channel sounder. The framework enables the training and systematic benchmarking of sequential and generative models for both single-step and multi-horizon vehicular channel state information (CSI) prediction to assess prediction robustness across different forecasting horizons, including LSTM, TCN, a CNN-enhanced Transformer, and ChannelGPT, with the goal of accurately predicting channel evolution while preserving spatiotemporal dynamics and non-stationarity. In addition, a system-level evaluation framework is introduced to assess the impact of channel prediction on the performance of vehicular distributed MIMO communications. Using predicted channels, spectral efficiency (SE) is evaluated against true CSI. Results show that ChannelGPT achieves over 94% normalized mean squared error (NMSE) reduction compared to LSTM and significant improvements over other baselines, while reducing FLOPs by 28% and inference latency by 39% relative to the CNN + Transformer. Moreover, ChannelGPT-predicted channels yield SE distributions nearly indistinguishable from those obtained with real measurements, demonstrating its effectiveness for reliable performance evaluation in high-mobility 6G vehicular networks.