English

Physics-Informed Transformer for Multi-Band Channel Frequency Response Reconstruction

Networking and Internet Architecture 2026-04-03 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

Wideband channel frequency response (CFR) estimation is challenging in multi-band wireless systems, especially when one or more sub-bands are temporarily blocked by co-channel interference. We present a physics-informed complex Transformer that reconstructs the full wideband CFR from such fragmented, partially observed spectrum snapshots. The interference pattern in each sub-band is modeled as an independent two-state discrete-time Markov chain, capturing realistic bursty occupancy behavior. Our model operates on the joint time-frequency grid of TT snapshots and FF frequency bins and uses a factored self-attention mechanism that separately attends along both axes, reducing the computational complexity to O(TF2+FT2)O(TF^2 + FT^2). Complex-valued inputs and outputs are processed through a holomorphic linear layer that preserves phase relationships. Training uses a composite physics-informed loss combining spectral fidelity, power delay profile (PDP) reconstruction, channel impulse response (CIR) sparsity, and temporal smoothness. Mobility effects are incorporated through per-sample velocity randomization, enabling generalization across different mobility regimes. Evaluation against three classical baselines, namely, last-observation-carry-forward, zero-fill, and cubic-spline interpolation, shows that our approach achieves the highest PDP similarity with respect to the ground truth, reaching ρ0.82\rho \geq 0.82 compared to ρ0.62\rho \geq 0.62 for the best baseline at interference occupancy levels up to 50%. Furthermore, the model degrades smoothly across the full velocity range, consistently outperforming all other baselines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.01944,
  title  = {Physics-Informed Transformer for Multi-Band Channel Frequency Response Reconstruction},
  author = {Anatolij Zubow and Joana Angjo and Sigrid Dimce and Falko Dressler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.01944},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:50:51.550Z