Accurate channel state information (CSI) acquisition is essential for modern wireless systems, which becomes increasingly difficult under large antenna arrays, strict pilot overhead constraints, and diverse deployment environments. Existing artificial intelligence-based solutions often lack robustness and fail to generalize across scenarios. To address this limitation, this paper introduces a predictive-foundation-model-based channel estimation framework that enables accurate, low-overhead, and generalizable CSI acquisition. The proposed framework employs a predictive foundation model trained on large-scale cross-domain data to extract universal channel representations and provide predictive priors with strong cross-scenario transferability. A pilot processing network based on a vision transformer architecture is further designed to capture spatial, temporal, and frequency correlations from pilot observations. An efficient fusion mechanism integrates predictive priors with real-time measurements, enabling reliable CSI reconstruction even under sparse or noisy conditions. Extensive evaluations across diverse configurations demonstrate that the proposed estimator significantly outperforms both classical and data-driven baselines in accuracy, robustness, and generalization capability.

The superimposed pilot transmission scheme offers substantial potential for improving spectral efficiency in MIMO-OFDM systems, but it presents significant challenges for receiver design due to pilot contamination and data interference. To address these issues, we propose an advanced iterative receiver based on joint channel estimation, signal detection, and decoding, which refines the receiver outputs through iterative feedback. The proposed receiver incorporates two adaptive channel estimation strategies to improve robustness against discrepancies between the time-varying channel conditions encountered during training and those experienced during testing. First, a variational message passing (VMP) method and its low-complexity variant (VMP-L) are introduced to perform inference without relying on time-domain correlation. Second, a deep learning (DL) based estimator is developed, featuring a convolutional neural network with a despreading module and an attention mechanism to extract and fuse relevant channel features. Extensive simulations under multi-stream and high-mobility scenarios demonstrate that the proposed receiver consistently outperforms conventional orthogonal pilot baselines in both throughput and block error rate. Moreover, over-the-air experiments validate the practical effectiveness of the proposed design. Among the methods, the DL based estimator achieves a favorable trade-off between performance and complexity, highlighting its suitability for real-world deployment in dynamic wireless environments.

The fast time-varying channels in high-speed scenarios impact signal transmission between transceivers and pose challenges to both the accuracy and bandwidth utilization of communication systems. Semantic communication, known for its ability to significantly reduce transmission bandwidth and enhance communication reliability, is especially effective in extreme environments. However, current semantic communication systems lack a comprehensive physical layer design, which limits their ability to achieve optimal performance in rapidly changing conditions. In this paper, we propose an adaptive semantic speech recognition and cloning transmission system with a superimposed pilot (SwitchAC-SIP) tailored for high-speed scenarios to ensure high-quality speech transmission. The system converts speech signals into textual content and speaker timbre features at the transmitter, while a speech cloning model reconstructs the speech at the receiver with a timbre closely resembling the original speaker based on these features, thereby eliminating the need to retrain the speech generation model for different users, ensuring both transmission quality and efficiency. To address the impact of high-speed environments on channel estimation performance, we introduce a superimposed pilot (SIP) in the physical layer. This method superimposes pilots and data across the entire time-frequency grid with a specific power ratio, significantly mitigating the detrimental effects of high-speed conditions on semantic communication systems. Furthermore, to enhance system flexibility in dynamic scenarios, we design a channel-adaptive network that dynamically allocates bandwidth ratios for text and audio semantics based on real-time channel conditions. This adaptive approach prioritizes the protection of critical semantic features according to user requirements. Simulation results demonstrate the substantial improvements in transmission efficiency and accuracy achieved by the proposed system.

This paper investigates the downlink channel estimation problem for frequency division duplex (FDD) multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. We model this problem within the sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) framework, where all unknowns are treated as random variables. Due to limited scattering at the base station, the channel exhibits sparsity in the angular domain. By introducing Gaussian mixture priors to characterize the user equipment internal sparsity and partially shared sparsity, we develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to implement Bayesian inference and accurately estimate all random variables in the model, including the channel matrix. Experimental results demonstrate that the MCMC-based SBL channel estimation algorithm outperforms existing approaches by over 5 dB in multi-user scenarios while reducing pilot overhead.

The superimposed pilot (SIP) transmission scheme shows great potential for improving spectral efficiency in MIMO-OFDM systems. However, it also introduces complex challenges for receiver design, particularly due to pilot contamination and data interference. To address these issues, the joint channel estimation, signal detection, and decoding (JCDD) framework has emerged as a promising solution, utilizing iterative refinement to enhance receiver performance. Despite this, existing JCDD methods either focus heavily on theoretical analysis, often neglecting practical application scenarios, or experience performance limitations due to inherent design flaws. In this paper, we propose an advanced iterative JCDD receiver that effectively mitigates the negative effects of pilot contamination and data interference. Our approach improves traditional linear minimum mean-square error (LMMSE) channel estimation by incorporating state-of-the-art techniques—specifically variational message passing (VMP) and deep learning (DL)—allowing for better adaptation to varying channel conditions. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that our proposed SIP receiver not only surpasses the conventional orthogonal pilot (OP) scheme but also exhibits outstanding adaptability in mismatched channel environments, thanks to the VMP and DL-based improvements.

The acquisition of channel state information (CSI) is essential in MIMO-OFDM communication systems. Data-aided enhanced receivers, by incorporating domain knowledge, effectively mitigate performance degradation caused by imperfect CSI, particularly in dynamic wireless environments. However, existing methodologies face notable challenges: they either refine channel estimates within MIMO subsystems separately, which proves ineffective due to deviations from assumptions regarding the time-varying nature of channels, or fully exploit the time-frequency characteristics but incur significantly high computational overhead due to dimensional concatenation. To address these issues, this study introduces a novel data-aided method aimed at reducing complexity, particularly suited for fast-fading scenarios in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks. We derive a general form of a data-aided linear minimum mean-square error (LMMSE)-based algorithm, optimized for iterative joint channel estimation and signal detection. Additionally, we propose a computationally efficient alternative to this algorithm, which achieves comparable performance with significantly reduced complexity. Empirical evaluations reveal that our proposed algorithms outperform several state-of-the-art approaches across various MIMO-OFDM configurations, pilot sequence lengths, and in the presence of time variability. Comparative analysis with basis expansion model-based iterative receivers highlights the superiority of our algorithms in achieving an effective trade-off between accuracy and computational complexity.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology has significantly enhanced spectral and power efficiency in cellular communications and is expected to further evolve towards extra-large-scale MIMO. However, centralized processing for massive MIMO faces practical obstacles, including excessive computational complexity and a substantial volume of baseband data to be exchanged. To address these challenges, decentralized baseband processing has emerged as a promising solution. This approach involves partitioning the antenna array into clusters with dedicated computing hardware for parallel processing. In this paper, we investigate the gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method—an advanced MIMO detection technique known for its near-optimal performance in centralized implementation—within the context of a decentralized baseband processing architecture. This decentralized design mitigates the computation burden at a single processing unit by utilizing computational resources in a distributed and parallel manner. Additionally, we integrate the mini-batch stochastic gradient descent method into the proposed decentralized detector, achieving remarkable performance with high efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate substantial performance gains of the proposed method over existing decentralized detectors across various scenarios. Moreover, complexity analysis reveals the advantages of the proposed decentralized strategy in terms of computation delay and interconnection bandwidth when compared to conventional centralized detectors.

Along with the prosperity of generative artificial intelligence (AI), its potential for solving conventional challenges in wireless communications has also surfaced. Inspired by this trend, we investigate the application of the advanced diffusion models (DMs), a representative class of generative AI models, to high dimensional wireless channel estimation. By capturing the structure of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless channels via a deep generative prior encoded by DMs, we develop a novel posterior inference method for channel reconstruction. We further adapt the proposed method to recover channel information from low-resolution quantized measurements. Additionally, to enhance the over-the-air viability, we integrate the DM with the unsupervised Stein’s unbiased risk estimator to enable learning from noisy observations and circumvent the requirements for ground truth channel data that is hardly available in practice. Results reveal that the proposed estimator achieves high-fidelity channel recovery while reducing estimation latency by a factor of 10 compared to state-of-the-art schemes, facilitating real-time implementation. Moreover, our method outperforms existing estimators while reducing the pilot overhead by half, showcasing its scalability to ultra-massive antenna arrays.

Accurately detecting symbols transmitted over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless channels is crucial in realizing the benefits of MIMO techniques. However, optimal MIMO detection is associated with a complexity that grows exponentially with the MIMO dimensions and quickly becomes impractical. Recently, stochastic sampling-based Bayesian inference techniques, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), have been combined with the gradient descent (GD) method to provide a promising framework for MIMO detection. In this work, we propose to efficiently approach optimal detection by exploring the discrete search space via MCMC random walk accelerated by Nesterov’s gradient method. Nesterov’s GD guides MCMC to make efficient searches without the computationally expensive matrix inversion and line search. Our proposed method operates using multiple GDs per random walk, achieving sufficient descent towards important regions of the search space before adding random perturbations, guaranteeing high sampling efficiency. To provide augmented exploration, extra samples are derived through the trajectory of Nesterov’s GD by simple operations, effectively supplementing the sample list for statistical inference and boosting the overall MIMO detection performance. Furthermore, we design an early stopping tactic to terminate unnecessary further searches, remarkably reducing the complexity. Simulation results and complexity analysis reveal that the proposed method achieves exceptional performance in both uncoded and coded MIMO systems, adapts to realistic channel models, and scales well to large MIMO dimensions.

Optimal detection of symbols transmitted over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless channels is known to entail exponentially increasing complexity with MIMO dimensions, making it impractical for large-scale systems. Recently, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) has been combined with the gradient descent (GD) method to create a promising machine learning solution to this issue. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for approaching optimal detection via MCMC random walk accelerated by Nesterov's gradient method, efficiently exploring the discrete search space for MIMO detection. Our proposed method utilizes multiple GDs per random walk and guarantees high sampling efficiency while mitigating the complexity associated with matrix inversions. Simulation results and complexity analysis reveal that the proposed method achieves near-optimal performance and scales effectively to large MIMO dimensions.

Multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM), a fundamental transmission scheme, promises high throughput and robustness against multipath fading. However, these benefits rely on the efficient detection strategy at the receiver and come at the expense of the extra bandwidth consumed by the cyclic prefix (CP). We use the iterative orthogonal approximate message passing (OAMP) algorithm in this paper as the prototype of the detector because of its remarkable potential for interference suppression. However, OAMP is computationally expensive for the matrix inversion per iteration. We replace the matrix inversion with the conjugate gradient (CG) method to reduce the complexity of OAMP. We further unfold the CG-based OAMP algorithm into a network and tune the critical parameters through deep learning (DL) to enhance detection performance. Simulation results and complexity analysis show that the proposed scheme has significant gain over other iterative detection methods and exhibits comparable performance to the state-of-the-art DL-based detector at a reduced computational cost. Furthermore, we design a highly efficient CP-free MIMO-OFDM receiver architecture to remove the CP overhead. This architecture first eliminates the intersymbol interference by buffering the previously recovered data and then detects the signal using the proposed detector. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the designed receiver offers a higher spectral efficiency than traditional receivers. Finally, over-the-air tests verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme in realistic environments.