Ziyi Qi

Xuejian Zhang, Ruisi He, Minseok Kim et al.

The deep integration of communication with intelligence and sensing, as a defining vision of 6G, renders environment-aware channel prediction a key enabling technology. As a representative 6G application, vehicular communications require accurate and forward-looking channel prediction under stringent reliability, latency, and adaptability demands. Traditional empirical and deterministic models remain limited in balancing accuracy, generalization, and deployability, while the growing availability of onboard and roadside sensing devices offers a promising source of environmental priors. This paper proposes an environment-aware channel prediction framework based on multimodal visual feature fusion. Using GPS data and vehicle-side panoramic RGB images, together with semantic segmentation and depth estimation, the framework extracts semantic, depth, and position features through a three-branch architecture and performs adaptive multimodal fusion via a squeeze-excitation attention gating module. For 360-dimensional angular power spectrum (APS) prediction, a dedicated regression head and a composite multi-constraint loss are further designed. As a result, joint prediction of path loss (PL), delay spread (DS), azimuth spread of arrival (ASA), azimuth spread of departure (ASD), and APS is achieved. Experiments on a synchronized urban V2I measurement dataset yield the best root mean square error (RMSE) of 3.26 dB for PL, RMSEs of 37.66 ns, 5.05 degrees, and 5.08 degrees for DS, ASA, and ASD, respectively, and mean/median APS cosine similarities of 0.9342/0.9571, demonstrating strong accuracy, generalization, and practical potential for intelligent channel prediction in 6G vehicular communications.

Xuejian Zhang, Ruisi He, Mi Yang et al.

The communication scenarios and channel characteristics of 6G will be more complex and difficult to characterize. Conventional methods for channel prediction face challenges in achieving an optimal balance between accuracy, practicality, and generalizability. Additionally, they often fail to effectively leverage environmental features. Within the framework of integration communication and artificial intelligence as a pivotal development vision for 6G, it is imperative to achieve intelligent prediction of channel characteristics. Vision-aided methods have been employed in various wireless communication tasks, excluding channel prediction, and have demonstrated enhanced efficiency and performance. In this paper, we propose a vision-aided two-stage model for channel prediction in millimeter wave vehicular communication scenarios, realizing accurate received power prediction utilizing solely RGB images. Firstly, we obtain original images of propagation environment through an RGB camera. Secondly, three typical computer vision methods including object detection, instance segmentation and binary mask are employed for environmental information extraction from original images in stage 1, and prediction of received power based on processed images is implemented in stage 2. Pre-trained YOLOv8 and ResNets are used in stages 1 and 2, respectively, and fine-tuned on datasets. Finally, we conduct five experiments to evaluate the performance of proposed model, demonstrating its feasibility, accuracy and generalization capabilities. The model proposed in this paper offers novel solutions for achieving intelligent channel prediction in vehicular communications.