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
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
Citation
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.
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}}}