PACC: Propagation-Aware Channel Charting with Physics-Guided Metric Learning

Abstract

Channel charting has emerged as a promising paradigm that maps high-dimensional channel state information into a low-dimensional latent space, facilitating tasks such as radio environment sensing and beam management. However, existing methods often rely on precise user locations or timestamp-based pseudo-labels, which are difficult to obtain in privacy-sensitive scenarios and rapidly varying wireless environments. To address these limitations, we propose propagation-aware channel charting with physics-guided metric learning (PACC), a location-free framework that constructs channel-domain supervision from propagation characteristics without requiring explicit geographic information. Specifically, PACC designs a propagation-aware dissimilarity metric that adapts to line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight propagation conditions, thereby preserving both local neighborhood relationships and the intrinsic geometry of the radio environment. Simulation results demonstrate that PACC consistently outperforms both classical dimensionality-reduction methods and state-of-the-art learning-based channel-charting approaches under diverse propagation conditions.