Advancing Ubiquitous Wireless Connectivity Through Channel Twinning
Yashuai Cao, Linglong Dai, Jingbo Tan, Jintao Wang, Tianyue Zheng, Wei Ni, Ekram Hossain, Dusit Tao Niyato · IEEE Communications Magazine · 2025
As an emerging trend in channel acquisition (CA), the concept of channel twinning (CT) has been proposed as a powerful enabler of ubiquitous connectivity in next-generation (xG) wireless systems. By fusing multimodal sensor data, CT advo-cates a high-fidelity and low-overhead CA paradigm, which is promising to provide accurate channel prediction in cross-domain and high-mobility scenarios of ubiquitous xG networks. However, existing literature lacks a universal CT architecture to address the challenges of heterogeneous scenarios, data, and resources in xG networks, which hinders the wide-spread deployment and applications of CT. This article discusses a new modularized CT architecture to bridge scene recognition, cooperative sensing, and decentralized training, comprising versatile model configuration, multimodal cooperative sensing, and lightweight twin modeling modules. Additionally, this article presents a detailed concept, technical features, and case studies of CT, outlines mainstream trends of realization methods, and cites potential applications of CT-empowered ubiquitous connectivity and issues requiring future investigations.