Neural Beamforming with Doppler-Aware Sparse Attention for High Mobility Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces a Doppler-aware sparse attention neural network for beamforming in high mobility wireless environments, improving robustness and scalability over traditional and existing deep learning methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel Doppler-aware sparse attention mechanism tailored for wireless channels, ensuring full connectivity and better performance in high mobility scenarios.

Findings

Outperforms traditional ZFBF and MMSE beamforming in high mobility environments.

Maintains structured sparsity with fewer attended keys per query.

Demonstrates significant performance gains in urban macro channel simulations.

Abstract

Beamforming has significance for enhancing spectral efficiency and mitigating interference in multi-antenna wireless systems, facilitating spatial multiplexing and diversity in dense and high mobility scenarios. Traditional beamforming techniques such as zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) beamforming experience performance deterioration under adverse channel conditions. Deep learning-based beamforming offers an alternative with nonlinear mappings from channel state information (CSI) to beamforming weights by improving robustness against dynamic channel environments. Transformer-based models are particularly effective due to their ability to model long-range dependencies across time and frequency. However, their quadratic attention complexity limits scalability in large OFDM grids. Recent studies address this issue through sparse attention mechanisms that reduce complexity while maintaining expressiveness, yet often employ patterns that disregard channel dynamics, as they are not specifically designed for wireless communication scenarios. In this work, we propose a Doppler-aware Sparse Neural Network Beamforming (Doppler-aware Sparse NNBF) model that incorporates a channel-adaptive sparse attention mechanism in a multi-user single-input multiple-output (MU-SIMO) setting. The proposed sparsity structure is configurable along 2D time-frequency axes based on channel dynamics and is theoretically proven to ensure full connectivity within p hops, where p is the number of attention heads. Simulation results under urban macro (UMa) channel conditions show that Doppler-aware Sparse NNBF significantly outperforms both a fixed-pattern baseline, referred to as Standard Sparse NNBF, and conventional beamforming techniques ZFBF and MMSE beamforming in high mobility scenarios, while maintaining structured sparsity with a controlled number of attended keys per query.