94.7ITMay 12
Performance Analysis of Single-Antenna Fluid Antenna Systems via Extreme Value TheoryRui Xu, Yinghui Ye, Xiaoli Chu et al.
In single-antenna fluid antenna systems (FASs), the transceiver dynamically selects the antenna port with the strongest instantaneous channel to enhance link reliability. However, deriving accurate yet tractable performance expressions under fully correlated fading remains challenging, primarily due to the absence of a closed-form distribution for the FAS channel. To address this gap, this paper develops a novel performance evaluation framework for FAS operating under fully correlated Rayleigh fading, by modeling the FAS channel through extreme value distributions (EVDs). We first justify the suitability of EVD modeling and approximate the FAS channel through the Gumbel distribution, with parameters expressed as functions of the number of ports and the antenna aperture size via the maximum likelihood (ML) criterion. Closed-form expressions for the outage probability (OP) and ergodic capacity (EC) are then derived. While the Gumbel model provides an excellent fit, minor deviations arise in the extreme-probability regions. To further improve accuracy, we extend the framework using the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution and obtain closed-form OP and EC approximations based on ML-derived parameters. Simulation results confirm that the proposed GEV-based framework achieves superior accuracy over the Gumbel-based model, while both EVD-based approaches offer computationally efficient and analytically tractable tools for evaluating the performance of FAS under realistic correlated fading conditions.
75.2ITMar 24
DUGC-VRNet: Joint VR Recognition and Channel Estimation for Spatially Non-Stationary XL-MIMOJinhao Nie, Guangchi Zhang, Miao Cui et al.
In this letter, we address spatially non-stationary near-field channel estimation for extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems with a hybrid combining architecture. One key challenge in the considered problem lies in that conventional channel estimation algorithms typically struggle to effectively identify and adapt to the partial antenna visibility caused by varying visibility regions (VRs), thereby compromising estimation accuracy. To perform joint VR recognition and channel estimation, we integrate a deep unfolding network (DUN) with a graph convolution network (GCN), leading to a Deep Unfolding and Graph Convolution coupled, Visibility Region Aware Network (DUGC-VRNet). By leveraging the channel's graph structure, the GCN infers and feeds back VR information to dynamically guide the DUN's updates, thereby enhancing reliable channel estimation under spatial non-stationarity. To reduce DUGC-VRNet's complexity, we apply weight pruning to obtain a lightweight network. Simulation results demonstrate that the DUGC-VRNet and its pruned variant achieve superior channel estimation and more accurate VR recognition under spatially non-stationary conditions.
86.4NIMay 12
Toward Communication-Efficient Space Data Centers: Bottlenecks, Architectures, and New ParadigmsMinghao Sun, Zehui Chen, Jinbo Hou et al.
The rapid growth of foundation model training and large-scale AI services has driven ground data centers toward unprecedented power densities, intensifying challenges in energy supply, cooling, and spatial scalability. Space Data Centers (SDCs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for hosting energy-intensive computing infrastructures in orbit, leveraging continuous solar energy and radiative cooling advantages. However, unlike ground facilities primarily constrained by power and site availability, SDCs are fundamentally limited by communication capability. The gap between petabit-scale internal data exchange in ground data centers and the gigabit-scale capacity of ground-space links forms a critical bottleneck. This article systematically analyzes communication constraints in SDC architectures and explores semantic communication as a key enabling paradigm. By transmitting compact, task-relevant semantic representations instead of raw data, uplink pressure can be substantially reduced. The feasibility of communication-efficient orbital AI infrastructures is demonstrated through the evaluation of a multi-layer heterogeneous SDC framework consisting of relay satellites and orbital computing nodes operating under coupled energy and thermal constraints. The article further outlines open research challenges toward scalable deployment.
NIMay 22, 2025
LLM-Based Emulation of the Radio Resource Control Layer: Towards AI-Native RAN ProtocolsZiming Liu, Bryan Liu, Alvaro Valcarce et al.
Integrating Large AI Models (LAMs) into 6G mobile networks is a key enabler of the AI-Native Air Interface (AI-AI), where protocol intelligence must scale beyond handcrafted logic. This paper presents, to our knowledge, the first standards-compliant emulation of the Radio Resource Control (RRC) layer using a decoder-only LAM (LLAMA-class) fine-tuned with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on a multi-vendor corpus of real-world traces spanning both 5G and 4G systems. We treat RRC as a domain-specific language and construct a segmentation-safe, question--answer (Question-and-Answer (QA)) dataset that preserves Abstract Syntax Notation (ASN.1) structure through linearization prior to Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization. The proposed approach combines parameter-efficient adaptation with schema-bounded prompting to ensure syntactic and procedural fidelity. Evaluation introduces a standards-aware triad -- ASN.1 conformance, field-level coverage analysis, and uplink-to-downlink state-machine checks -- alongside semantic similarity and latency profiling across 120 configurations. On 30k 5G request--response pairs plus an additional 4.8k QA turns from 4G sessions, our 8B model achieves a median cosine similarity of 0.97, a 61% relative gain over a zero-shot baseline, while sustaining high conformance rates. These results demonstrate that LAMs, when augmented with protocol-aware reasoning, can directly orchestrate control-plane procedures, laying the foundation for the future Artificial Intelligence (AI)-native Radio Access Network (RAN).