Channel Charting-Based Channel Prediction on Real-World Distributed Massive MIMO CSI

Distributed massive MIMO is considered a key advancement for improving the performance of next-generation wireless telecommunication systems. However, its efficacy in scenarios involving user mobility is limited due to channel aging. To address this challenge, channel prediction techniques are investigated to forecast future channel state information (CSI) based on previous estimates. We propose a new channel prediction method based on channel charting, a self-supervised learning technique that reconstructs a physically meaningful latent representation of the radio environment using similarity relationships between CSI samples. The concept of inertia within a channel chart allows for predictive radio resource management tasks through the latent space. We demonstrate that channel charting can be used to predict future CSI by exploiting spatial relationships between known estimates that are embedded in the channel chart. Our method is validated on a real-world distributed massive MIMO dataset, and compared to a Wiener predictor and the outdated CSI in terms of achievable sum rate.

Bistatic Information Fusion for Positioning and Tracking in Integrated Sensing and Communication

The distributed nature of cellular networks is one of the main enablers for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). For target positioning and tracking, making use of bistatic measurements is non-trivial due to their non-linear relationship with Cartesian coordinates. Most of the literature proposes geometric-based methods to determine the target's location by solving a well-defined set of equations stemming from the available measurements. The error covariance to be used for Bayesian tracking is then derived from local Taylor expansions. In our work we adaptively fuse any subset of bistatic measurements using a maximum likelihood (ML) framework, allowing to incorporate every possible combination of available measurements, i.e., transmitter angle, receiver angle and bistatic range. Moreover, our ML approach is intrinsically flexible, as it can be extended to fuse an arbitrary number of measurements by multistatic setups. Finally, we propose both a fixed and dynamic way to compute the covariance matrix for the position error to be fed to Bayesian tracking techniques, like a Kalman filter. Numerical evaluations with realistic cellular communications parameters at mmWave frequencies show that our proposal outperforms the considered baselines, achieving a location and velocity root mean square error of 0.25 m and 0.83 m/s, respectively.

Bounds for Joint Detection and Decoding on the Binary-Input AWGN Channel

For asynchronous transmission of short blocks, preambles for packet detection contribute a non-negligible overhead. To reduce the required preamble length, joint detection and decoding (JDD) techniques have been proposed that additionally utilize the payload part of the packet for detection. In this paper, we analyze two instances of JDD, namely hybrid preamble and energy detection (HyPED) and decoder-aided detection (DAD). While HyPED combines the preamble with energy detection for the payload, DAD also uses the output of a channel decoder. For these systems, we propose novel achievability and converse bounds for the rates over the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (BI-AWGN) channel. Moreover, we derive a general bound on the required blocklength for JDD. Both the theoretical bound and the simulation of practical codebooks show that the rate of DAD quickly approaches that of synchronous transmission.

ESPARGOS: Phase-Coherent WiFi CSI Datasets for Wireless Sensing Research

The use of WiFi signals to sense the physical environment is gaining popularity, with some common applications being motion detection and transmitter localization. Standard-compliant WiFi provides a cost effective, easy and backward-compatible approach to Joint Communication and Sensing and enables a seamless transfer of results from experiments to practical applications. However, most WiFi sensing research is conducted on channel state information (CSI) data from current-generation devices, which are usually not meant for sensing applications and thus lack sufficient spatial diversity or phase synchronization. With ESPARGOS, we previously developed a phase-coherent, real-time capable many-antenna WiFi channel sounder specifically for wireless sensing. We describe how we use ESPARGOS to capture large CSI datasets that we make publicly available. The datasets are extensively documented and labeled, for example with information from reference positioning systems, enabling data-driven and machine learning-based research.

Leveraging the Doppler Effect for Channel Charting

Channel Charting is a dimensionality reduction technique that reconstructs a map of the radio environment from similarity relationships found in channel state information. Distances in the channel chart are often computed based on some dissimilarity metric, which can be derived from angular-domain information, channel impulse responses, measured phase differences or simply timestamps. Using such information implicitly makes strong assumptions about the level of phase and time synchronization between base station antennas or assumes approximately constant transmitter velocity. Many practical systems, however, may not provide phase and time synchronization and single-antenna base stations may not even have angular-domain information. We propose a Doppler effect-based loss function for Channel Charting that only requires frequency synchronization between spatially distributed base station antennas, which is a much weaker assumption. We use a dataset measured in an indoor environment to demonstrate that the proposed method is practically feasible with just four base station antennas, that it produces a channel chart that is suitable for localization in the global coordinate frame and that it outperforms other state-of-the-art methods under the given limitations.

GAN-based Massive MIMO Channel Model Trained on Measured Data

Wireless channel models are a commonly used tool for the development of wireless telecommunication systems and standards. The currently prevailing geometry-based stochastic channel models (GSCMs) were manually specified for certain environments in a manual process requiring extensive domain knowledge, on the basis of channel measurement campaigns. By taking into account the stochastic distribution of certain channel properties like Rician k-factor, path loss or delay spread, they model the distribution of channel realizations. Instead of this manual process, a generative machine learning model like a generative adversarial network (GAN) may be used to automatically learn the distribution of channel statistics. Subsequently, the GAN's generator may be viewed as a channel model that can replace conventional stochastic or raytracer-based models. We propose a GAN architecture for a massive MIMO channel model, and train it on measurement data produced by a distributed massive MIMO channel sounder.

CRAP Part II: Clutter Removal with Continuous Acquisitions Under Phase Noise

The mitigation of clutter is an important research branch in Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), one of the emerging technologies of future cellular networks. In this work, we extend our previously introduced method Clutter Removal with Acquisitions Under Phase Noise (CRAP) by means to track clutter over time. This is necessary in scenarios that require high reliability but can change dynamically, like safety applications in factory floors. To that end, exponential smoothing is leveraged to process new measurements and previous clutter information in a unique matrix using the singular value decomposition, allowing adaptation to changing environments in an efficient way.We further propose a singular value threshold based on the Marchenko-Pastur distribution to select the meaningful clutter components. Results from both simulations and measurements show that continuously updating the clutter components with new acquisitions according to our proposed algorithm Smoothed CRAP (SCRAP) enables coping with dynamic clutter environments and facilitates the detection of sensing targets.

Antenna Array Design for Mono-Static ISAC

Mono-static sensing operations in Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) require joint beamforming operations between transmitter and receiver, according to all the considerations already done in the radar literature about coarray theory. In contrast to pure radar systems, ISAC requires to fulfill communications tasks and to retain the corresponding design constraints for at least one half-duplex array. This shifts the available degrees of freedom to the design of the second half-duplex array, that completes the mono-static sensing setup of the ISAC system. Therefore, it is necessary to translate the analysis from the radar literature for the design of sparse arrays to the new ISAC paradigm in order to provision such systems. Accordingly, we propose a model to evaluate the angular capabilities of an ISAC setup, constrained to the shape of the communications array and its topology requirements. Our analysis is validated by simulation experiments, confirming the value of our model in providing system designers with a tool to drastically improve the trade-off between angular capabilities for sensing and the cost of the deployed hardware. Finally, we discuss possible enhancements to the cellular standards to fully leverage the angular capabilities of such mono-static ISAC systems.

Graph Neural Network-based Joint Equalization and Decoding

This paper proposes to use graph neural networks (GNNs) for equalization, that can also be used to perform joint equalization and decoding (JED). For equalization, the GNN is build upon the factor graph representations of the channel, while for JED, the factor graph is expanded by the Tanner graph of the parity-check matrix (PCM) of the channel code, sharing the variable nodes (VNs). A particularly advantageous property of the GNN is the robustness against cycles in the factor graphs which is the main problem for belief propagation (BP)-based equalization. As a result of having a fully deep learning-based receiver, joint optimization instead of individual optimization of the components is enabled, so-called end-to-end learning. Furthermore, we propose a parallel flooding schedule that further reduces the latency, which turns out to improve also the error correcting performance. The proposed approach is analyzed and compared to state-of-the-art baselines in terms of error correcting capability and latency. At a fixed low latency, the flooding GNN for JED demonstrates a gain of 2.25 dB in bit error rate (BER) compared to an iterative Bahl--Cock--Jelinek--Raviv (BCJR)-BP baseline.

Deep Learning Based Adaptive Joint mmWave Beam Alignment

The challenging propagation environment, combined with the hardware limitations of mmWave systems, gives rise to the need for accurate initial access beam alignment strategies with low latency and high achievable beamforming gain. Much of the recent work in this area either focuses on one-sided beam alignment, or, joint beam alignment methods where both sides of the link perform a sequence of fixed channel probing steps. Codebook-based non-adaptive beam alignment schemes have the potential to allow multiple user equipment (UE) to perform initial access beam alignment in parallel whereas adaptive schemes are favourable in achievable beamforming gain. This work introduces a novel deep learning based joint beam alignment scheme that aims to combine the benefits of adaptive, codebook-free beam alignment at the UE side with the advantages of a codebook-sweep based scheme at the base station. The proposed end-to-end trainable scheme is compatible with current cellular standard signaling and can be readily integrated into the standard without requiring significant changes to it. Extensive simulations demonstrate superior performance of the proposed approach over purely codebook-based ones.