A New Paradigm of 6G Networks: Proactive Channel Cognition and Reconfiguration

Wenyan Ma; Zixiang Ren; Weitong Zhai; Ge Yan; Lipeng Zhu; Zhenyu Xiao; Rui Zhang

Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2608.29725

A New Paradigm of 6G Networks: Proactive Channel Cognition and Reconfiguration

Wenyan Ma·Zixiang Ren·Weitong Zhai·Ge Yan·Lipeng Zhu·Zhenyu Xiao·Rui Zhang

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

The sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks are expected to enable the deep integration of communication, sensing, computing, control, and intelligence in highly dynamic environments. This evolution drives a fundamental transition from conventional passive channel adaptation to proactive channel cognition and reconfiguration, wherein wireless channels are no longer regarded as uncontrollable propagation media but as network resources that can be learned, predicted, and actively reconfigured. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of this emerging paradigm. We first review channel cognition through the channel knowledge map (CKM) as a systematic framework for learning and exploiting channel characteristics across space, time, and frequency domain. The definitions, construction methods, and applications in wireless networks of CKMs are comprehensively reviewed. Building upon channel cognition, we then review channel reconfiguration technologies from two complementary perspectives: transceiver-side reconfiguration enabled by movable antennas (MAs) and environment-side reconfiguration enabled by intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). For both MA- and IRS-enabled wireless systems, we review their architectures, performance advantages, and key design challenges. Finally, we discuss several promising research directions to inspire further innovations in this burgeoning field.

Explore related subjects

eess.SP

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Wenyan Ma, Zixiang Ren, Weitong Zhai, Ge Yan, Lipeng Zhu, Zhenyu Xiao, Rui Zhang. 2026-08-30. A New Paradigm of 6G Networks: Proactive Channel Cognition and Reconfiguration. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.29725

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Low-Interference N-Continuous OFDM via Optimized Time-Domain Smoothing

A novel basis signal optimization method is proposed for reducing the interference in the N-continuous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (NC-OFDM) system. Compared to conventional NC-OFDM, the proposed scheme is capable of improving the transmission performance while maintaining an identical sidelobe suppression performance imposed by the linear combination of two groups of basis signals. Our performance results demonstrate that with a low-complexity overhead, the proposed scheme is capable of striking a better trade-off among the bit error rate (BER), complexity, and the sidelobe suppression performance compared to its conventional counterparts.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Self-Localizing MIMO Beam Mapping with Continuously Evolving Channel Memory

Machine learning has greatly advanced data-driven channel modeling and resource optimization. However, most existing methods require accurately location-labeled datasets, which are costly to collect and maintain in dynamic environments. This paper develops a self-localizing multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beam map framework that constructs a hierarchical wireless memory from highly sparse channel state information (CSI) measurements without explicit location labels. To reduce acquisition and processing overhead, we use beamdomain received signal strength (RSS) as compact inputs and theoretically show that they enable asymptotically unbiased spatial signature estimation. A dual-scale extractor captures intrasnapshot angular dependencies and inter-sample correlations for incomplete observations, and a hybrid temporal encoder is designed to consolidate recent CSI into stable short-term context for physical anchor inference. The inferred anchors spatially index a physically structured radio map embedding that stores long-term channel knowledge, which conditions a diffusion decoder for location-consistent full CSI reconstruction. Such a radio map embedding provides a persistent wireless knowledge representation that can be continuously updated and reused without full CSI acquisition. Experiments show that the proposed framework improves physical-anchor recovery accuracy by over 30% under sparse measurements and achieves more than 20% channel-capacity gain in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) beam tracking over Kalman-filter-based methods.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Few-Shot Specific Emitter Identification via Integrated Complex Variational Mode Decomposition and Spatial Attention Transfer

Specific emitter identification (SEI) utilizes passive hardware characteristics to authenticate transmitters, providing a robust physical-layer security solution. However, most deep-learning-based methods rely on extensive data or require prior information, which poses challenges in real-world scenarios with limited labeled data. We propose an integrated complex variational mode decomposition algorithm that decomposes and reconstructs complex-valued signals to approximate the original transmitted signals, thereby enabling more accurate feature extraction. We further utilize a temporal convolutional network to effectively model the sequential signal characteristics, and introduce a spatial attention mechanism to adaptively weight informative signal segments, significantly enhancing identification performance. Additionally, the branch network allows leveraging pre-trained weights from other data while reducing the need for auxiliary datasets. Ablation experiments on the simulated data demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of the model. An accuracy comparison on a public dataset reveals that our method achieves 96% accuracy using only 10 symbols without requiring any prior knowledge.

eess.SP↗