Predicting the Mumble of Wireless Channel with Sequence-to-Sequence Models

Accurate prediction of fading channel in the upcoming transmission frame is essential to realize adaptive transmission for transmitters, and receivers with the ability of channel prediction can also save some computations of channel estimation. However, due to the rapid channel variation and channel estimation error, reliable prediction is hard to realize. In this situation, an appropriate channel model should be selected, which can cover both the statistical model and small scale fading of channel, this reminds us the natural languages, which also have statistical word frequency and specific sentences. Accordingly, in this paper, we take wireless channel model as a language model, and the time-varying channel as talking in this language, while the realistic noisy estimated channel can be compared with mumbling. Furthermore, in order to utilize as much as possible the information a channel coefficient takes, we discard the conventional two features of absolute value and phase, replacing with hundreds of features which will be learned by our channel model, to do this, we use a vocabulary to map a complex channel coefficient into an ID, which is represented by a vector of real numbers. Recurrent neural networks technique is used as its good balance between memorization and generalization, moreover, we creatively introduce sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models in time series channel prediction, which can translates past channel into future channel. The results show that realistic channel prediction with superior performance relative to channel estimation is attainable.