CSI Estimation, Compression, and Prediction Using Deep Learning

Doktorsavhandling, 2026

Acquiring accurate channel state information (CSI) is essential for enabling reliable and efficient wireless transmission and reception. However, CSI is inherently stochastic, high-dimensional, and time-varying, which makes its acquisition particularly challenging. Motivated by the success of deep learning (DL) across many data modalities, this thesis explores DL-based solutions for CSI estimation, compression, and prediction.

First, we study CSI estimation in full-duplex (FD) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where strong self-interference (SI) complicates channel acquisition. To reduce the pilot and computational burden of estimating both SI and user channels, we propose a pilot-sharing strategy together with a convolutional neural network that jointly estimates these channels.
We further introduce a neural mapping that enables CSI acquisition at the transmit chain.

Second, we investigate DL–based CSI compression and its limited robustness under distribution shifts. To address this issue, we adopt a full-model fine-tuning while explicitly accounting for model update signaling overhead. Specifically, we employ a spike-and-slab prior to promote sparsity in the model updates and fine-tune the pretrained network using a rate–distortion objective regularized by the update bit rate.

Third, we tackle CSI prediction using a diffusion-based generative framework. The method consists of a temporal encoder that extracts latent features from past CSI and a diffusion generator that synthesizes future CSI. We also study a simplified encoder-free design to reduce latency, compare autoregressive and sequence-to-sequence inference, and explore multiple architectures for both temporal encoding and diffusion generation.