Transformer-Based MCS Prediction for 5G Multicast-Broadcast Services (MBS)

Link Adaptation (LA) in 5G NR is inherently reactive, relying on channel measurements and HARQ feedback that may become quickly obsolete when the channel changes quickly. This data is also noisy, making it hard to track accurately, and has to be fed to real-time controllers with feedback-loop effects which are hard to troubleshoot. This explains why most practical deployments select simple but robust algorithms, which accept that the lag can leave the scheduler operating at overly aggressive or unnecessarily conservative rates, trading spectrum efficiency for predictable performance. In this paper, we improve on this status-quo with NOSTRAdAMUS, a predictive LA framework which adds foresight to existing algorithms without replacing or redesigning them. NOSTRAdAMUS predicts whether a retransmission will occur in the next radio frame from recent HARQ history, and applies corrections to the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) selected by the underlying policy. We benchmark several ML models and show that Gradient Boosting achieves 82.9% accuracy overall with high-confidence interventions that are correct 94.2% of the time, and an inference latency of 5.5 {\mu}s. We train the model based on data collected Over-the-Air (OTA) on the X5G testbed, using the open-source OpenAirInterface (OAI) 5G stack, NVIDIA Aerial, and COTS O-RAN Radio Units and User Equipments. The model is then deployed as a dApp, which we evaluate OTA as well as on various channels with hardware-in-the-loop channel emulators. This includes 3GPP TDL and CDL channels, SISO and MIMO configurations, and pedestrian and vehicular mobility. Our evaluation shows that without retraining, and across this variety of scenarios, the dApp augments two SOTA LA algorithms, and increases goodput by up to 71.5% while reducing retransmissions by up to 71.8%. This demonstrates the robustness and generalization capabilities of our approach.

Accurate channel state information (CSI) prediction is essential for proactive beamforming and resource management in 5G massive MIMO systems, yet the deployment of high-accuracy transformer-based predictors on base-station hardware remains challenging because the most capable models carry upwards of 30,M parameters. This paper introduces Lightweight PCGAE-Net, which addresses the efficiency problem not by post-hoc compression but by correcting two architectural flaws in the current state of the art. The first is a sequential attention ordering bias: in CS3T-UNet, group-wise temporal attention (GTA) always operates on features that have already been transformed by cross-shaped spatial attention (CSA), distorting what temporal information GTA can capture. We remove this dependency by routing both attention modules to the same layer-normalized input and combining their independent outputs through a learned per-channel sigmoid CrossGate. The second flaw is an uncompressed bottleneck: applying full self-attention at the deepest encoder stage, where channel depth reaches $4C$, is quadratically expensive and carries redundant features. A Bottleneck AutoEncoder (BAE) with $1\times1$ convolutions halves this depth and uses an auxiliary reconstruction loss to prevent information collapse. Wrapping these components inside a shallower encoder-decoder with frequency-domain dimensionality reduction ($N_f\!=\!32$, $C\!=\!48$) produces a model with just 8.54,M parameters -- 58% fewer than the CS3T-UNet baseline -- that outperforms it by up to 3.26,dB at 5,km/h and 6.0,dB at 9,km/h in single-step prediction on QuaDriGa dataset.

Throughput prediction is foundational for artificial intelligence-driven 6G resource orchestration. Conventional monolithic machine learning models struggle to generalize across diverse operators, mobility modes, and traffic types, leaving a critical stochasticity gap between signal conditions and achievable throughput. To overcome these constraints in heterogeneous urban environments, we propose a Tiered Multi-Agent System (TMAS) that dynamically routes edge telemetry to context-aware Domain Micro-Agents, validated on a dataset of 48,618 samples collected in Sunway City, Malaysia, with Nemo Handy drive test software, spanning three Tier-1 mobile network operators, three mobility modes, namely (i) elevated pedestrian walkway, (ii) ground-level shuttle bus, and (iii) elevated bus rapid transit; and three traffic profiles, namely (i) persistent download, (ii) persistent upload, and (iii) adaptive video streaming. Our evaluations reveal that TMAS overcomes predictability bottlenecks, achieving a coefficient of determination (R2) of up to 0.931 and a Mean Absolute Error (MAE) as low as 0.53 Mbps. The system demonstrates high operational efficiency, with rapid micro-agent training times, low inference latencies, and agentic routing overhead of 0.004 to 0.126 ms. These latency characteristics indicate the architecture is a promising candidate for the response times required by next-generation wireless networks.