Unified Generalization for Frequency-Domain Channel Extrapolation Across Near-Field and Far-Field Scenarios

Abstract

As antenna arrays grow, near-field effects become non-negligible in large-scale MIMO, making accurate low-overhead channel acquisition crucial in both far-field and near-field regimes. Deep-learning-based frequency-domain channel extrapolation can reduce pilot overhead, but existing extrapolators generalize poorly to unseen distances and environments, especially across near-field and far-field channels. We propose a physically interpretable framework to unify generalization across both regimes. Our key insight is that angular profiles are regime-dependent, while delay profiles share a sparsity structure that can be aligned. Based on this, we develop a physics-guided disentanglement and alignment pipeline with multi-cluster decoupling, angle-delay feature disentanglement, and delay-domain alignment, enabling the model to learn distribution-stable delay features while reusing heterogeneous angular features. We further design a unified near/far-field DL extrapolator (UNiFi-DLE) and detail its dataset preparation, training, and inference. Simulations and sim-to-real experiments show that UNiFi-DLE generalizes robustly to unseen near-field and far-field scenarios and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.