CaFTRA: Frequency-Domain Correlation-Aware Feedback-Free MIMO Transmission and Resource Allocation for 6G and Beyond

TL;DR

CaFTRA introduces an AI-driven, feedback-free MIMO transmission framework for 6G that predicts channel information from user location, enabling extensive coverage and improved spectral efficiency without uplink feedback.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel frequency-domain correlation-aware feedback-free MIMO framework using AI and a transformer network for CSI prediction, enhancing coverage and efficiency in 6G networks.

Findings

Achieves stable matching convergence in resource allocation.

Significantly improves spectral efficiency over 5G.

Expands downlink coverage by eliminating uplink feedback.

Abstract

The fundamental design of wireless systems toward AI-native 6G and beyond is driven by the need for ever-increasing demand of mobile data traffic, extreme spectral efficiency, and adaptability across diverse service scenarios. To overcome the limitations posed by feedback-based multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, we propose a novel frequency-domain Correlation-aware Feedback-free MIMO Transmission and Resource Allocation (CaFTRA) framework tailored for fully-decoupled radio access networks (FD-RAN) to meet the emerging requirements of AI-Native 6G and beyond. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), CaFTRA effectively eliminates real-time uplink feedback by predicting channel state information (CSI) based solely on user geolocation. We introduce a Learnable Queries-driven Transformer Network for CSI mapping from user geolocation, which utilizes multi-head attention and learnable query embeddings to accurately capture frequency-domain correlations among resource blocks (RBs), thereby significantly improving the precision of CSI prediction. Once base stations (BSs) adopt feedback-free transmission, their downlink transmission coverage can be significantly expanded due to the elimination of frequent uplink feedback. To enable efficient resource scheduling under such extensive-coverage scenarios, we apply a low-complexity many-to-one matching theory-based algorithm for efficient multi-BS association and multi-RB resource allocation, which is proven to converge to a stable matching within limited iterations. Simulation results demonstrate that CaFTRA achieves stable matching convergence and significant gains in spectral efficiency and user fairness compared to 5G, underscoring its potential value for 6G standardization efforts.