Environment Knowledge-Aided Massive MIMO Feedback Codebook Enhancement Using Artificial Intelligence

The autoencoder empowered by artificial intelligence has shown considerable potential in solving channel state information (CSI) feedback problems in frequency-division duplexing systems. However, this method needs to completely change the existing feedback schemes, which is difficult to deploy in the next few years. This paper proposes an environment knowledge-aided codebook-based CSI feedback framework, which retains the existent codebook-based scheme while introducing environment knowledge to feedback process through neural networks (NNs) at the base station. Only an NN-based refining operation is added after the common standardized feedback approach. The NNs learn to automatically extract environment features and utilize the channel statistics through large volumes of recorded data. The NNs also use the partial correlation between bidirectional channels to further improve feedback performance. In addition, to deal with downlink channel estimation errors, we propose two strategies to reduce their effects using an NN-based denoise module. The proposed framework can be easily embedded in most existing codebook-based feedback methods, such as random vector quantization. Two channel datasets generated by QuaDRiGa and measured in practical systems are adopted to evaluate the proposed methods. Results show that the proposed method offers over 100% increase in the throughput compared with the baseline codebook because of more accurate feedback.