Towards deep learning-aided wireless channel estimation and channel state information feedback for 6G

Deep learning (DL), a branch of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, has shown great promise in various disciplines such as image classification and segmentation, speech recognition, language translation, among others. This remarkable success of DL has stimulated increasing interest in applying this paradigm to wireless channel estimation in recent years. Since DL principles are inductive in nature and distinct from the conventional rule-based algorithms, when one tries to use DL technique to the channel estimation, one might easily get stuck and confused by so many knobs to control and small details to be aware of. The primary purpose of this paper is to discuss key issues and possible solutions in DL-based wireless channel estimation and channel state information (CSI) feedback including the DL model selection, training data acquisition, and neural network design for 6G. Specifically, we present several case studies together with the numerical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the DL-based wireless channel estimation framework.