Near-Field Wideband Channel Estimation for XL-MIMO Systems via Denoising Diffusion Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a diffusion model-based approach for near-field wideband channel estimation in XL-MIMO systems, addressing challenges like spatial non-stationarity and beam split effects with a novel multi-scale attention network.

Contribution

It presents a new deep generative modeling method employing a diffusion model and multi-scale attention for improved near-field wideband channel estimation in XL-MIMO.

Findings

The proposed method outperforms baseline schemes in robustness and accuracy.

The diffusion model effectively captures complex spatial-frequency channel structures.

Experimental results validate the superiority of the approach across various settings.

Abstract

Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) is a key enabling technology for sixth-generation (6G) communication systems. Nevertheless, the increase in array aperture and signal bandwidth brings new challenges to wideband channel estimation in XL-MIMO systems. Motivated by recent advances in deep generative modeling, we propose a diffusion model-based method for near-field wideband channel estimation in XL-MIMO systems. We first analyze the statistical correlation of wideband channel and show that near-field wideband channel exhibits both spatial non-stationarity and beam split effects. Based on these observations, the channel estimation problem is formulated as a Bayesian posterior inference task, in which a diffusion model is employed to learn the prior distribution of the channel. To further enhance the representation of complex spatial-frequency channel structures, we design a denoising network with a multi-scale attention mechanism. In particular, the network extracts multi-scale spatial-frequency features via parallel convolutional branches with different receptive fields, and combines feature attention and spatial attention modules to adaptively emphasize critical channel features. This design enables more accurate modeling of near-field wideband channel distributions and consequently improves channel estimation performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits superior robustness to existing baseline schemes for XL-MIMO wideband channel estimation under different experimental settings.