Physics-Informed Transformer for Multi-Band Channel Frequency Response Reconstruction
Organizations: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, TU Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Abstract
Wideband channel frequency response (CFR) estimation is challenging in multi-band wireless systems, especially when one or more sub-bands are temporarily blocked by co-channel interference. We present a physics-informed complex Transformer that reconstructs the full wideband CFR from such fragmented, partially observed spectrum snapshots. The interference pattern in each sub-band is modeled as an independent two-state discrete-time Markov chain, capturing realistic bursty occupancy behavior. Our model operates on the joint time-frequency grid of snapshots and frequency bins and uses a factored self-attention mechanism that separately attends along both axes, reducing the computational complexity to . Complex-valued inputs and outputs are processed through a holomorphic linear layer that preserves phase relationships. Training uses a composite physics-informed loss combining spectral fidelity, power delay profile (PDP) reconstruction, channel impulse response (CIR) sparsity, and temporal smoothness. Mobility effects are incorporated through per-sample velocity randomization, enabling generalization across different mobility regimes. Evaluation against three classical baselines, namely, last-observation-carry-forward, zero-fill, and cubic-spline interpolation, shows that our approach achieves the highest PDP similarity with respect to the ground truth, reaching compared to for the best baseline at interference occupancy levels up to 50%. Furthermore, the model degrades smoothly across the full velocity range, consistently outperforming all other baselines.
Figures & tables
| Parameter | Symbol | Value |
| Carrier frequency | 3.5 GHz | |
| Total bandwidth | 100 MHz | |
| Number of sub-bands | 5 (each 20 MHz) | |
| Bins per sub-band | 256 | |
| Total frequency bins | 1280 | |
| Freq. resolution | 78.1 kHz/bin |
| Training condition | at 0.5 m/s | at 7 m/s | at 30 m/s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fixed m/s | 0.886 | 0.765 | 0.686 |
| Fixed m/s | 0.872 | 0.825 | 0.775 |
| Fixed m/s | 0.835 | 0.804 | 0.770 |
| Random m/s | 0.870 | 0.819 | 0.786 |
Channel Estimation
Channel estimation infers wireless propagation effects from pilots or received signals so transmitters and receivers can communicate reliably.
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