Channel Fingerprint Construction for Massive MIMO: A Deep Conditional Generative Approach

Accurate channel state information (CSI) acquisition for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is essential for future mobile communication networks. Channel fingerprint (CF), also referred to as channel knowledge map, is a key enabler for intelligent environment-aware communication and can facilitate CSI acquisition. However, due to the cost limitations of practical sensing nodes and test vehicles, the resulting CF is typically coarse-grained, making it insufficient for wireless transceiver design. In this work, we introduce the concept of CF twins and design a conditional generative diffusion model (CGDM) with strong implicit prior learning capabilities as the computational core of the CF twin to establish the connection between coarse- and fine-grained CFs. Specifically, we employ a variational inference technique to derive the evidence lower bound (ELBO) for the log-marginal distribution of the observed fine-grained CF conditioned on the coarse-grained CF, enabling the CGDM to learn the complicated distribution of the target data. During the denoising neural network optimization, the coarse-grained CF is introduced as side information to accurately guide the conditioned generation of the CGDM. To make the proposed CGDM lightweight, we further leverage the additivity of network layers and introduce a one-shot pruning approach along with a multi-objective knowledge distillation technique. Experimental results show that the proposed approach exhibits significant improvement in reconstruction performance compared to the baselines. Additionally, zero-shot testing on reconstruction tasks with different magnification factors further demonstrates the scalability and generalization ability of the proposed approach.

EnvCDiff: Joint Refinement of Environmental Information and Channel Fingerprints via Conditional Generative Diffusion Model

The paradigm shift from environment-unaware communication to intelligent environment-aware communication is expected to facilitate the acquisition of channel state information for future wireless communications. Channel Fingerprint (CF), as an emerging enabling technology for environment-aware communication, provides channel-related knowledge for potential locations within the target communication area. However, due to the limited availability of practical devices for sensing environmental information and measuring channel-related knowledge, most of the acquired environmental information and CF are coarse-grained, insufficient to guide the design of wireless transmissions. To address this, this paper proposes a deep conditional generative learning approach, namely a customized conditional generative diffusion model (CDiff). The proposed CDiff simultaneously refines environmental information and CF, reconstructing a fine-grained CF that incorporates environmental information, referred to as EnvCF, from its coarse-grained counterpart. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance of EnvCF construction compared to the baselines.

Near-Field Channel Estimation for XL-MIMO: A Deep Generative Model Guided by Side Information

This paper investigates the near-field (NF) channel estimation (CE) for extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems. Considering the pronounced NF effects in XL-MIMO communications, we first establish a joint angle-distance (AD) domain-based spherical-wavefront physical channel model that captures the inherent sparsity of XL-MIMO channels. Leveraging the channel's sparsity in the joint AD domain, the CE is approached as a task of reconstructing sparse signals. Anchored in this framework, we first propose a compressed sensing algorithm to acquire a preliminary channel estimate. Harnessing the powerful implicit prior learning capability of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), we further propose a GenAI-based approach to refine the estimated channel. Specifically, we introduce the preliminary estimated channel as side information, and derive the evidence lower bound (ELBO) of the log-marginal distribution of the target NF channel conditioned on the preliminary estimated channel, which serves as the optimization objective for the proposed generative diffusion model (GDM). Additionally, we introduce a more generalized version of the GDM, the non-Markovian GDM (NM-GDM), to accelerate the sampling process, achieving an approximately tenfold enhancement in sampling efficiency. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach is capable of offering substantial performance gain in CE compared to existing benchmark schemes within NF XL-MIMO systems. Furthermore, our approach exhibits enhanced generalization capabilities in both the NF or far-field (FF) regions.

Massive MIMO-OFDM Channel Acquisition with Time-Frequency Phase-Shifted Pilots

In this paper, we propose a channel acquisition approach with time-frequency phase-shifted pilots (TFPSPs) for massive multi-input multi-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) systems. We first present a triple-beam (TB) based channel tensor model, allowing for the representation of the space-frequency-time (SFT) domain channel as the product of beam matrices and the TB domain channel tensor. By leveraging the specific characteristics of TB domain channels, we develop TFPSPs, where distinct pilot signals are simultaneously transmitted in the frequency and time domains. Then, we present the optimal TFPSP design and provide the corresponding pilot scheduling algorithm. Further, we propose a tensor-based information geometry approach (IGA) to estimate the TB domain channel tensors. Leveraging the specific structure of beam matrices and the properties of TFPSPs, we propose a low-complexity implementation of the tensor-based IGA. We validate the efficiency of our proposed channel acquisition approach through extensive simulations. Simulation results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach. The proposed approach can effectively suppress inter-UT interference with low complexity and limited pilot overhead, thereby enhancing channel estimation performance. Particularly in scenarios with a large number of UTs, the channel acquisition method outperforms existing approaches by reducing the normalized mean square error (NMSE) by more than 8 dB.

Statistical CSI Acquisition for Multi-frequency Massive MIMO Systems

Multi-frequency massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication is a promising strategy for both 5G and future 6G systems, ensuring reliable transmission while enhancing frequency resource utilization. Statistical channel state information (CSI) has been widely adopted in multi-frequency massive MIMO transmissions to reduce overhead and improve transmission performance. In this paper, we propose efficient and accurate methods for obtaining statistical CSI in multi-frequency massive MIMO systems. First, we introduce a multi-frequency massive MIMO channel model and analyze the mapping relationship between two types of statistical CSI, namely the angular power spectrum (APS) and the spatial covariance matrix, along with their correlation across different frequency bands. Next, we propose an autoregressive (AR) method to predict the spatial covariance matrix of any frequency band based on that of another frequency band. Furthermore, we emphasize that channels across different frequency bands share similar APS characteristics. Leveraging the maximum entropy (ME) criterion, we develop a low-complexity algorithm for high-resolution APS estimation. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the AR-based covariance prediction method and demonstrate the high-resolution estimation capability of the ME-based approach. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-frequency cooperative transmission by applying the proposed methods to obtain statistical CSI from low-frequency bands and utilizing it for high-frequency channel transmission. This approach significantly enhances high-frequency transmission performance while effectively reducing system overhead.

GNN-enabled Precoding for Massive MIMO LEO Satellite Communications

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite communication is a critical component in the development of sixth generation (6G) networks. The integration of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology is being actively explored to enhance the performance of LEO satellite communications. However, the limited power of LEO satellites poses a significant challenge in improving communication energy efficiency (EE) under constrained power conditions. Artificial intelligence (AI) methods are increasingly recognized as promising solutions for optimizing energy consumption while enhancing system performance, thus enabling more efficient and sustainable communications. This paper proposes approaches to address the challenges associated with precoding in massive MIMO LEO satellite communications. First, we introduce an end-to-end graph neural network (GNN) framework that effectively reduces the computational complexity of traditional precoding methods. Next, we introduce a deep unfolding of the Dinkelbach algorithm and the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) approach to achieve enhanced EE, transforming iterative optimization processes into a structured neural network, thereby improving convergence speed and computational efficiency. Furthermore, we incorporate the Taylor expansion method to approximate matrix inversion within the GNN, enhancing both the interpretability and performance of the proposed method. Numerical experiments demonstrate the validity of our proposed method in terms of complexity and robustness, achieving significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

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.

SCNR Maximization for MIMO ISAC Assisted by Fluid Antenna System

The integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology has been extensively researched to enhance communication rates and radar sensing capabilities. Additionally, a new technology known as fluid antenna system (FAS) has recently been proposed to obtain higher communication rates for future wireless networks by dynamically altering the antenna position to obtain a more favorable channel condition. The application of the FAS technology in ISAC scenarios holds significant research potential. In this paper, we investigate a FAS-assisted multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) ISAC system for maximizing the radar sensing signal-clutter-noise ratio (SCNR) under communication signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and antenna position constraints. We devise an iterative algorithm that tackles the optimization problem by maximizing a lower bound of SCNR with respect to the transmit precoding matrix and the antenna position. By addressing the non-convexity of the problem through this iterative approach, our method significantly improves the SCNR. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a higher SCNR compared to the baselines.

Symplectic Optimization for Cross Subcarrier Precoder Design with Channel Smoothing in Massive MIMO-OFDM System

In this paper, we propose a cross subcarrier precoder design (CSPD) for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The aim is to maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) performance while considering the smoothness of the frequency domain effective channel. To quantify the smoothness of the effective channel, we introduce a delay indicator function to measure the large delay components of the effective channel. An optimization problem is then formulated to balance the WSR performance and the delay indicator function. By appropriately selecting the weight factors in the objective function and the parameters in the delay indicator function, the delay spread of the effective channel can be reduced, thereby enhancing the smoothness of the effective channel. To solve the optimization problem, we apply the symplectic optimization, which achieves faster convergence compared to the gradient descent methods. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm achieves satisfying WSR performance while maintaining the smoothness of the effective channel.

Beam Structured Turbo Receiver for HF Skywave Massive MIMO

In this paper, we investigate receiver design for high frequency (HF) skywave massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications. We first establish a modified beam based channel model (BBCM) by performing uniform sampling for directional cosine with deterministic sampling interval, where the beam matrix is constructed using a phase-shifted discrete Fourier transform (DFT) matrix. Based on the modified BBCM, we propose a beam structured turbo receiver (BSTR) involving low-dimensional beam domain signal detection for grouped user terminals (UTs), which is proved to be asymptotically optimal in terms of minimizing mean-squared error (MSE). Moreover, we extend it to windowed BSTR by introducing a windowing approach for interference suppression and complexity reduction, and propose a well-designed energy-focusing window. We also present an efficient implementation of the windowed BSTR by exploiting the structure properties of the beam matrix and the beam domain channel sparsity. Simulation results validate the superior performance of the proposed receivers but with remarkably low complexity.