Data Augmentation for Bridging the Delay Gap in DL-Based Massive MIMO CSI Feedback

In massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems under the frequency division duplexing (FDD) mode, the user equipment (UE) needs to feed channel state information (CSI) back to the base station (BS). Though deep learning approaches have made a hit in the CSI feedback problem, whether they can remain excellent in actual environments needs to be further investigated. In this letter, we point out that the real-time dataset in application often has the domain gap from the training dataset caused by the time delay. To bridge the gap, we propose bubble-shift (B-S) data augmentation, which attempts to offset performance degradation by changing the delay and remaining the channel information as much as possible. Moreover, random-generation (R-G) data augmentation is especially proposed for outdoor scenarios due to the complex distribution of its channels. It generalizes the characteristics of the channel matrix and alleviates the over-fitting problem. Simulation results show that the proposed data augmentation boosts the robustness of networks in both indoor and outdoor environments.