Continuous-Time Transformer-Based Channel Prediction With Non-Uniform Pilot Pattern
Yiliang Sang, Ke Ma, Lebin Yao, Pengyu Wang, Zhaocheng Wang, Zhu Han, Sheng Chen · IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications · 2026
Deep learning based channel prediction has garnered significant attention to mitigate channel aging in high-mobility multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, existing channel prediction methods extract the temporal correlations from the channel sequences estimated at uniform pilots, which require dense pilot configuration to mitigate Doppler aliasing in high-mobility scenarios and incur substantial estimation overhead. To tackle this problem, we propose a channel prediction method based on continuous-time transformer with the non-uniform pilot pattern, thereby enabling accurate prediction across arbitrary time scales with only a small number of pilots. Specifically, we first design the non-uniform pilot pattern based on Chebyshev polynomial roots and then prove its optimality under Doppler-dominated channel variations with relatively stable user velocity, wherein a subset of pilots are densely configured to provide a finer resolution of Doppler phase estimation. To adapt to the non-uniform pattern, a continuous-time transformer is further proposed, which integrates the superior feature extraction capability of transformer with the continuous-time modeling strength of neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) for flexibly processing the estimated channel sequences with non-uniform time scales. More concretely, the attention mechanism is extended to the continuous-time domain by incorporating neural ODE, while a high-frequency temporal encoding is designed to fit rapidly time-varying channels. Besides, an element-wise prediction mechanism is proposed to efficiently capture temporal correlations and prevent overfitting. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method can realize accurate continuous-time channel prediction in high-mobility scenarios, and significantly outperforms existing channel prediction methods.