Efficient Implementation of an Adaptive Transformer Accelerator for Massive MIMO Outdoor Localization

TL;DR

This paper presents a hardware-optimized, adaptive Transformer-based localization system for 5G massive MIMO, achieving sub-10ms real-time positioning with high accuracy and efficiency on FPGA.

Contribution

It introduces a hardware design leveraging propagation-aware sparsity, mixed dataflow architecture, and runtime model switching for real-time 5G localization.

Findings

Achieves up to 65% row sparsity in the model.

Provides peak speedups of approximately 2x on FPGA.

Maintains below 10% localization accuracy degradation.

Abstract

We present the implementation of an adaptive Transformer-based localization system for 5G massive MIMO targeting sub-10ms real-time positioning. The design exploits propagation characteristics, where beam-delay channel representations exhibit sparsity, enabling a row-wise skipping mechanism that removes low-energy beam components with minimal control overhead. The contribution is focused on hardware realization of the model using a mixed dataflow architecture, combining input- and output-stationary execution, mapped onto a heterogeneous vector processing engine with parallel processing elements and adder trees for efficient matrix computation. Environment-dependent processing is supported through a lightweight runtime model-switching mechanism, where temporally filtered outputs of a single-layer perceptron router enable stable selection between specialized models with reduced latency. Implemented on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA and evaluated on real-world massive MIMO measurements, the design achieves up to 65% row sparsity, yielding peak computational speedups of approximately 2x while limiting the average localization accuracy degradation to below 10%, relative to the floating-point baseline model. The accelerator attains below 1.15m localization accuracy across scenarios, with inference latency of 0.51-2.11ms and throughput of up to 1961 positions/s. These results demonstrate that propagation-aware sparsity, mixed dataflow execution, and efficient runtime model switching enable a scalable and low-latency hardware realization of adaptive Transformer-based localization for real-time 5G systems.