Resilient Channel Charting Under Varying Radio Link Availability

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Pirkl, Jonas, Ott, Jonathan, Stahlke, Maximilian, Yammine, George, Feigl, Tobias, Mutschler, Christopher
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Pirkl, Jonas
Ott, Jonathan
Stahlke, Maximilian
Yammine, George
Feigl, Tobias
Mutschler, Christopher
author_facet Pirkl, Jonas
Ott, Jonathan
Stahlke, Maximilian
Yammine, George
Feigl, Tobias
Mutschler, Christopher
contents Channel charting (CC) has become a key technology for RF-based localization, enabling unsupervised radio fingerprinting, even in non line of sight scenarios, with a minimum of reference position labels. However, most CC models assume fixed-size inputs, such as a constant number of antennas or channel measurements. In practical systems, antennas may fail, signals may be blocked, or antenna sets may change during handovers, making fixed-input architectures fragile. Existing radio-fingerprinting approaches address this by training separate models for each antenna configuration, but the resulting training effort scales prohibitively with the array size. We propose Adaptive Positioning (AdaPos), a CC architecture that natively handles variable numbers of channel measurements. AdaPos combines convolutional feature extraction with a transformer-based encoder using learnable antenna identifiers and self-attention to fuse arbitrary subsets of CSI inputs. Experiments on two public real-world datasets (SISO and MIMO) show that AdaPos maintains state-of-the-art accuracy under missing-antenna conditions and replaces roughly 57 configuration-specific models with a single unified model. With AdaPos and our novel training strategies, we provide resilience to both individual antenna failures and full-array outages.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_04704
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Resilient Channel Charting Under Varying Radio Link Availability
Pirkl, Jonas
Ott, Jonathan
Stahlke, Maximilian
Yammine, George
Feigl, Tobias
Mutschler, Christopher
Signal Processing
Channel charting (CC) has become a key technology for RF-based localization, enabling unsupervised radio fingerprinting, even in non line of sight scenarios, with a minimum of reference position labels. However, most CC models assume fixed-size inputs, such as a constant number of antennas or channel measurements. In practical systems, antennas may fail, signals may be blocked, or antenna sets may change during handovers, making fixed-input architectures fragile. Existing radio-fingerprinting approaches address this by training separate models for each antenna configuration, but the resulting training effort scales prohibitively with the array size. We propose Adaptive Positioning (AdaPos), a CC architecture that natively handles variable numbers of channel measurements. AdaPos combines convolutional feature extraction with a transformer-based encoder using learnable antenna identifiers and self-attention to fuse arbitrary subsets of CSI inputs. Experiments on two public real-world datasets (SISO and MIMO) show that AdaPos maintains state-of-the-art accuracy under missing-antenna conditions and replaces roughly 57 configuration-specific models with a single unified model. With AdaPos and our novel training strategies, we provide resilience to both individual antenna failures and full-array outages.
title Resilient Channel Charting Under Varying Radio Link Availability
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04704