A Tensor-Structured Approach to Dynamic Channel Prediction for Massive MIMO Systems with Temporal Non-Stationarity

Abstract

In moderate- to high-mobility scenarios, CSI varies rapidly and becomes temporally non-stationary, leading to severe performance degradation in the massive MIMO transmissions. To address this issue, we propose a tensor-structured approach to dynamic channel prediction (TS-DCP) for massive MIMO systems with temporal non-stationarity, exploiting both dual-timescale and cross-domain correlations. Specifically, due to inherent spatial consistency, non-stationary channels over long-timescales can be approximated as stationary on short-timescales, decoupling complicated temporal correlations into more tractable dual-timescale ones. To exploit such property, we propose the sliding frame structure composed of multiple pilot OFDM symbols, which capture short-timescale correlations within frames by Doppler domain modeling and long-timescale correlations across frames by Markov/autoregressive processes. Building on this, we develop the Tucker-based spatial-frequency-temporal domain channel model, incorporating angle-delay-Doppler (ADD) domain channels and factor matrices parameterized by ADD domain grids. Furthermore, we model cross-domain correlations of ADD domain channels within each frame, induced by clustered scattering, through the Markov random field and tensor-coupled Gaussian distribution that incorporates high-order neighboring structures. Following these probabilistic models, we formulate the TS-DCP problem as variational free energy (VFE) minimization, and unify different inference rules through the structure design of trial beliefs. This formulation results in the dual-layer VFE optimization process and yields the online TS-DCP algorithm, where the computational complexity is reduced by exploiting tensor-structured operations. Numerical simulations demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed algorithm over benchmarks in terms of channel prediction performance.

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication