Efficient Implementation of an Adaptive Transformer Accelerator for Massive MIMO Outdoor Localization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yaman, Ilayda, Cheng, Sijia, Edfors, Ove, Liu, Liang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Yaman, Ilayda
Cheng, Sijia
Edfors, Ove
Liu, Liang
author_facet Yaman, Ilayda
Cheng, Sijia
Edfors, Ove
Liu, Liang
contents We present the implementation of an adaptive Transformer-based localization system for 5G massive MIMO targeting sub-10ms real-time positioning. The design exploits propagation characteristics, where beam-delay channel representations exhibit sparsity, enabling a row-wise skipping mechanism that removes low-energy beam components with minimal control overhead. The contribution is focused on hardware realization of the model using a mixed dataflow architecture, combining input- and output-stationary execution, mapped onto a heterogeneous vector processing engine with parallel processing elements and adder trees for efficient matrix computation. Environment-dependent processing is supported through a lightweight runtime model-switching mechanism, where temporally filtered outputs of a single-layer perceptron router enable stable selection between specialized models with reduced latency. Implemented on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA and evaluated on real-world massive MIMO measurements, the design achieves up to 65% row sparsity, yielding peak computational speedups of approximately 2x while limiting the average localization accuracy degradation to below 10%, relative to the floating-point baseline model. The accelerator attains below 1.15m localization accuracy across scenarios, with inference latency of 0.51-2.11ms and throughput of up to 1961 positions/s. These results demonstrate that propagation-aware sparsity, mixed dataflow execution, and efficient runtime model switching enable a scalable and low-latency hardware realization of adaptive Transformer-based localization for real-time 5G systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_13507
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Implementation of an Adaptive Transformer Accelerator for Massive MIMO Outdoor Localization
Yaman, Ilayda
Cheng, Sijia
Edfors, Ove
Liu, Liang
Hardware Architecture
We present the implementation of an adaptive Transformer-based localization system for 5G massive MIMO targeting sub-10ms real-time positioning. The design exploits propagation characteristics, where beam-delay channel representations exhibit sparsity, enabling a row-wise skipping mechanism that removes low-energy beam components with minimal control overhead. The contribution is focused on hardware realization of the model using a mixed dataflow architecture, combining input- and output-stationary execution, mapped onto a heterogeneous vector processing engine with parallel processing elements and adder trees for efficient matrix computation. Environment-dependent processing is supported through a lightweight runtime model-switching mechanism, where temporally filtered outputs of a single-layer perceptron router enable stable selection between specialized models with reduced latency. Implemented on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA and evaluated on real-world massive MIMO measurements, the design achieves up to 65% row sparsity, yielding peak computational speedups of approximately 2x while limiting the average localization accuracy degradation to below 10%, relative to the floating-point baseline model. The accelerator attains below 1.15m localization accuracy across scenarios, with inference latency of 0.51-2.11ms and throughput of up to 1961 positions/s. These results demonstrate that propagation-aware sparsity, mixed dataflow execution, and efficient runtime model switching enable a scalable and low-latency hardware realization of adaptive Transformer-based localization for real-time 5G systems.
title Efficient Implementation of an Adaptive Transformer Accelerator for Massive MIMO Outdoor Localization
topic Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13507