Low-Complexity Digital Twin for CSI Acquisition
in MIMO Communications

IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), 2026

Hao Luo1, Manan Gupta2, Talha Ahmed Khan2, and Ahmed Alkhateeb1

1Wireless Intelligence Lab, Arizona State University, USA

2Ericsson Research, Santa Clara, CA, USA

Digital twin aided CSI acquisition framework leverages the synthetic channel information from the digital twin to select a subset of codewords from the codebook that are better aligned with the dominant directions of the channel. This selection helps reduce the overhead of pilot transmission and UE-side computational complexity during the CSI acquisition process.

Abstract

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications will continue to be a cornerstone of modern wireless networks, thanks to the spatial multiplexing and beamforming gains enabled by large antenna arrays. However, acquiring precise downlink channel state information (CSI)—essential for effective precoding for large-scale antenna systems—involves substantial signaling overhead. In this paper, we propose a CSI acquisition framework that leverages digital twin to generate user-specific channel prior at the base-station, and reduces the CSI acquisition overhead. To achieve a low-complexity operation, we propose a multi-tiered digital twin architecture and complexity reduction methods, which reduce the ray-tracing runtime with minimal performance loss. Through comprehensive evaluations in an urban scenario, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can effectively reduce CSI acquisition overhead, and decrease the digital twin compute requirement by 56% while maintaining healthy cell coverage and spectral efficiency at the user.

Proposed Solution

This diagram illustrates the proposed complexity reduction methods: (a) simplifying the 3D geometry model by clipping buildings to a certain height, and (b) adjusting the maximum number of interactions for ray-tracing.

Citation

If you want to use the dataset or scripts in this page, please cite the following paper:

H. Luo, M. Gupta, T. A. Khan and A. Alkhateeb, “Low-Complexity Digital Twin for CSI Acquisition in MIMO Communications,” ICC 2026 – IEEE International Conference on Communications, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2026.

@INPROCEEDINGS{Luo2026,
author={Luo, Hao and Gupta, Manan and Khan, Talha Ahmed and Alkhateeb, Ahmed},
booktitle={ICC 2026 – IEEE International Conference on Communications},
title={Low-Complexity Digital Twin for CSI Acquisition in MIMO Communications},
year={2026},
pages={1-6}}}