CSI Feedback Based on Deep Learning for Massive MIMO Systems

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are a main enabler of the excessive throughput requirements in 5G and future generation wireless networks as they can serve many users simultaneously with high spectral and energy efficiency. To achieve this massive MIMO systems require accurate and timely channel state information (CSI), which is acquired by a training process that involves pilot transmission, CSI estimation, and feedback. This training process incurs a training overhead, which scales with the number of antennas, users, and subcarriers. Reducing the training overhead in massive MIMO systems has been a major topic of research since the emergence of the concept. Recently, deep learning (DL)-based approaches have been proposed and shown to provide significant reduction in the CSI acquisition and feedback overhead in massive MIMO systems compared to traditional techniques. In this paper, we present an overview of the state-of-the-art DL architectures and algorithms used for CSI acquisition and feedback, and provide further research directions.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by learning rich representations from massive and diverse text data. While pre-trained LLMs have been widely customized for a variety of text-related tasks, their potential in wireless communications remains largely untapped. In this paper, we propose a novel channel state information (CSI) feedback framework for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems that leverages pre-trained LLMs to bridge the gap between natural language processing and wireless communication. To adapt LLMs for the CSI feedback task, we design specialized pre-processing, embedding, and post-processing modules that convert CSI data into token representations compatible with LLMs. Moreover, to address the limitations of a single model and enhance performance in diverse environments and under various compression ratios, we introduce a mixture-of-agents (MoA)based framework that integrates the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs. Simulation results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior CSI reconstruction performance, robust generalization to unseen scenarios, and significant training cost reduction even with limited data. These findings confirm that the transferable knowledge acquired from large-scale natural language pre-training can effectively enhance CSI feedback, offering a promising direction for intelligent and efficient nextgeneration wireless communication systems.

This letter presents a finite-rate deep-learning (DL)-based channel state information (CSI) feedback method for massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The presented method provides a finite-bit representation of the latent vector based on a vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) framework while reducing its computational complexity based on shape-gain vector quantization. In this method, the magnitude of the latent vector is quantized using a non-uniform scalar codebook with a proper transformation function, while the direction of the latent vector is quantized using a trainable Grassmannian codebook. A multi-rate codebook design strategy is also developed by introducing a codeword selection rule for a nested codebook along with the design of a loss function. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the computational complexity of VQ-VAE while improving CSI reconstruction performance under a given feedback overhead.

Accurate downlink channel state information (CSI) is required to be fed back to the base station (BS) in frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in order to achieve maximum antenna diversity and multiplexing. However, downlink CSI feedback overhead scales with the number of transceiver antennas, a major hurdle for practical deployment of FDD massive MIMO systems. To solve this problem, we propose a compressive sampled CSI feedback method based on deep learning (SampleDL). In SampleDL, the massive MIMO channel matrix is sampled uniformly in time/frequency dimension before being fed into neural networks (NNs), which will reduce the computational resource/time at user equipment (UE) as well as enhance the CSI recovery accuracy at the BS. Both theoretical analysis and normalized mean square errors (NMSE) results confirm the advantages of the proposed method in terms of time complexity and recovery accuracy. Besides, a suitable CSI feedback period is explored by link level simulations, which aims to further reduce the overhead of CSI feedback without degrading the communication quality.

In this paper, we propose a cross-attention and self-attention Transformer-based network (CASA-TransNet) for channel state information (CSI) feedback in dual-polarized massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In dualpolarized massive MIMO systems, the channels in the horizontal and vertical polarization directions have a high correlation, which can be exploited for joint compression and reconstruction of the dual-polarized channels to improve the CSI feedback performance. The proposed CASA-TransNet employs a twostream cross-attention Transformer architecture and extracts the correlation between horizontal and vertical polarization CSI via cross-stream exchange of the query embeddings. Furthermore, a self-attention Transformer is utilized to model long-term dependencies of the dual-polarized CSI. Simulation results show that the proposed CASA-TransNet outperforms other deep learningbased methods, achieving better CSI reconstruction performance even at high compression ratios. Compared to state-of-the-art schemes, CASA-TransNet achieves a performance gain of $3.47 \sim 5.74 \mathrm{~dB}$.

Chapter 7 - Channel feedback for mmWave massive MIMO

Deep learning (DL)-based channel state information (CSI) feedback improves the capacity and energy efficiency of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in frequency division duplexing mode. However, multiple neural networks with different lengths of feedback overhead are required by time-varying bandwidth resources. The storage space required at the user equipment (UE) and the base station (BS) for these models increases linearly with the number of models. In this paper, we propose a DL-based changeable-rate framework with novel quantization scheme to improve the efficiency and feasibility of CSI feedback systems. This framework can reutilize all the network layers to achieve overhead-changeable CSI feedback to optimize the storage efficiency at the UE and the BS sides. Designed quantizer in this framework can avoid the normalization and gradient problems faced by traditional quantization schemes. Specifically, we propose two DL-based changeable-rate CSI feedback networks CH- CsiNetPro and CH- DualNetSph by introducing a feedback overhead control unit. Then, a pluggable quantization block (PQB) is developed to further improve the encoding efficiency of CSI feedback in an end-to-end way. Compared with existing CSI feedback methods, the proposed framework saves the storage space by about 50% with changeable-rate scheme and improves the encoding efficiency with the quantization module.

Massive MIMO is a promising technique to provide high data rate with good energy efficiency for the future wireless cellular communication. However, its performance benefit often can be realized only when accurate channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter to perform accurate beamforming. With large number of antennas, full CSI consumes too much overhead to feed back without compression. To reduce CSI feedback overhead, CSI feedback scheme with dual stage precoding structure is designed to quantize the long term spatial channel correlation information and short term linear precoder information. In this paper, we discuss how to optimize this dual stage precoding scheme in the typical dual-polarized massive MIMO system. The eigenvalues of spatial correlation matrix are used to improve feedback efficiency. By relaxing the constant modulus constraint in codebook design, more flexible long term precoding can be used and adapt to the channel. A specific structure of long term precoding matrix for dual-polarized MIMO system is proposed to ensure the orthogonality of the final precoder for multi-layer transmission.

In frequency division duplex (FDD) massive MIMO systems, the feedback of channel state information (CSI) increases greatly with the number of antennas raising. Therefore, it is a hot-spot to research how to reduce the feedback overhead. It is considered that massive MIMO channel is sparse and in actual situation the sparsity is unknown, so the sparse adaptive matching pursuit (SAMP) algorithm is introduced to cope with these problems. Aiming at solving the shortcomings of SAMP, including the fixed step size and too much iterations, the modified SAMP (M-SAMP) is proposed in this paper. We combine the signal segmenting, the initial sparsity estimating and variable step size to reconstruct the signal quickly and accurately. The simulation results show that M-SAMP is superior than the SAMP algorithm both in reconstruction accuracy and computation time. In addition, compared with the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP), subspace tracking (SP), and SAMP algorithms, the better normalized mean squared error (NMSE) performance of M-SAMP could be witnessed, which demonstrates the practicability of M-SAMP in massive MIMO systems.

Most learning-based channel state information (CSI) feedback efforts concentrate on enhancing feedback accuracy through innovative neural network (NN) designs and exploiting correlations. This paper introduces an integrated learning framework for CSI feedback and localization designed to synergistically improve both tasks. We present a novel unified approach for CSI feedback and downlink CSI-based localization, where feedback is facilitated by an autoencoder, and the downlink CSI-based localization uses the feedback codeword directly without requiring reconstruction. The goal is to simultaneously minimize feedback and localization errors. Additionally, for users with access to coarse position data, we propose a refined framework that integrates this information into both the feedback mechanism and localization processes. This coarse positional knowledge is incorporated into the encoding and decoding stages to reduce feedback errors and is inputted into the localization NN to enhance localization accuracy. The improved framework is refined through an end-to-end training strategy, focusing on concurrently reducing feedback and localization errors. Simulation results using ray tracing channel datasets demonstrate that our proposed method not only enables feedback and localization tasks to mutually benefit but also shows that incorporating coarse positional data significantly increases the accuracy of both CSI feedback and CSI-based localization.

In this paper, we investigate the suitability of single carrier frequency domain processing (SC-FDP) as the downlink transmission scheme in a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. By deriving the sum-rate of the SC-FDP massive MIMO system theoretically, we show that this method obtains a sum-rate similar to that of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) massive MIMO. We also derive the theoretical sum-rate of both SC-FDP and OFDM in a non-synchronized massive MIMO scenario and show that the rate of the former is significantly larger than that of the latter. Moreover, we theoretically analyze the sum-rate of both systems in the presence of power amplifier non-linearity. All the sum-rates are derived for both zero forcing and matched filter precoding schemes. The results show that the effect of power amplifier non-linearity on the sum-rate of both systems is similar when the number of users is large. We also compare SC-FDP with OFDM from the peak to average power ratio (PAPR) and complexity viewpoints. Although the PAPR of SC-FDP signals is lower than that of OFDM signals, for MIMO systems, the difference between their PAPR decreases as we increase the number of users. Thus, both techniques can have similar PAPR in massive MIMO systems. The overall complexity of SC-FDP and OFDM is similar. Due to the mentioned facts, SC-FDP can be considered as a promising transmission scheme for the downlink of the massive MIMO systems in the presence of carrier frequency offset and power amplifier non-linearities.

As a combination of spatial modulation (SM) system and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, massive SM aided MIMO (SM-MIMO) system is recently proposed. In broadband scenarios, single-carrier (SC) modulation is introduced to massive SM-MIMO system, thus massive SC-SM MIMO system is proposed for uplink multi-user transmission over frequency-selective fading channels. In this study, the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) of multi-cell massive SC-SM MIMO system is analysed, meanwhile the pilot contamination effect is taken into consideration. A tight SE lower bound of multi-cell massive SC-SM MIMO system is proposed with maximum ratio (MR) combining, which also takes into account the imperfect channel estimation, transmit antenna correlation and path loss. The tightness of the authors' proposed closed-form SE lower bound is shown via simulation results. The optimal pilot reuse factor can be determined with different system configurations by simulations, and the pilot reuse factor that is larger than one is more suitable for less TAs and user equipments.

Channel state information (CSI) feedback is critical for achieving the promised advantages of enhancing spectral and energy efficiencies in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communication systems. Deep learning (DL)-based methods have been proven effective in reducing the required signaling overhead for CSI feedback. In practical dual-polarized MIMO scenarios, channels in the vertical and horizontal polarization directions tend to exhibit high polarization correlation. To fully exploit the inherent propagation similarity within dual-polarized channels, we propose a disentangled representation neural network (NN) for CSI feedback, referred to as DiReNet. The proposed DiReNet disentangles dual-polarized CSI into three components: polarization-shared information, vertical polarization-specific information, and horizontal polarization-specific information. This disentanglement of dual-polarized CSI enables the minimization of information redundancy caused by the polarization correlation and improves the performance of CSI compression and recovery. Additionally, flexible quantization and network extension schemes are designed. Consequently, our method provides a pragmatic solution for CSI feedback to harness the physical MIMO polarization as a priori information. Our experimental results show that the performance of our proposed DiReNet surpasses that of existing DL-based networks, while also effectively reducing the number of network parameters by nearly one third.

The zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) based detectors can approach optimal performance in the uplink of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, they require inverting a matrix whose complexity is cubic in relation to the matrix dimension. This can lead to the high computational effort, especially in massive MIMO systems. To mitigate this, several iterative methods have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we consider accelerated Chebyshev SOR (AC-SOR) and accelerated Chebyshev AOR (AC-AOR) algorithms, which improve the detection performance of conventional Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR) and Accelerated Over-Relaxation (AOR) methods, respectively. Additionally, we propose using a deep unfolding network (DUN) to optimize the parameters of the iterative AC-SOR and AC-AOR algorithms, leading to the AC-AORNet and AC-SORNet methods, respectively. The proposed DUN-based method leads to significant performance improvements compared to conventional iterative detectors for various massive MIMO channels. The results demonstrate that the AC-AORNet and AC-SORNet are effective, outperforming other state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, they are highly effective, particularly for high-order modulations such as 256-QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation). Moreover, the proposed AC-AORNet and AC-SORNet require almost the same number of computations as AC-AOR and AC-SOR methods, respectively, since the use of deep unfolding has a negligible impact on the system’s detection complexity. Furthermore, the proposed DUN features a fast and stable training scheme due to its smaller number of trainable parameters.

For massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, downlink channel state information (CSI) feedback is critical for exploiting the performance potentials. Recognized by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project as a key use case for the artificial intelligence-native air interface, deep learning (DL)-based CSI feedback has attracted extensive research from academia and industry. However, one of the most significant obstacles to its practical deployment is the limited generalization capabilities of DL models. In this article, we first illustrate the generalization challenge faced by DL-based CSI feedback with the main factors. Then, we systematically analyze its feasible solutions from two perspectives: initial model acquisition and efficient online updating. Finally, to address knowledge-forgetting problems in online updating, a novel alternating optimization framework is proposed to further improve the generalization ability through knowledge review. Hopefully, this article can give inspiring insights for the optimization of deployment and generalization for DL-based CSI feedback systems.