Abstract

Beamspace multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) as a green technology can efficiently substitute for the conventional massive MIMO, provided that the beamspace channel is acquired precisely. The prior efforts in this area of study, especially the learning-driven ones, however, indicate remarkable performance losses owing to a lack of generalization. In this paper, we propose a modified non-linear auto-regressive exogenous (NARX) model for tracking and predicting the beamspace channel over the sequences of time. Benefiting from bounded generalization error, fast convergence, limited prediction variance, and negligible performance loss, the proposed scheme achieves up to 15% spectral efficiency (SE) gain over its counterparts. We further improve this performance by means of an ensemble learning technique for simultaneously training multiple NARX modules in parallel, thus leading to a 23% SE gain. Relying on the predicted beamspace channel, we propose a beamspace analog beam selection technique through fine-tuning the architecture of a pre-trained off-the-shelf GoogleNet, which brings up to 21% SE gain over similar baselines. With the aid of an ensemble learning technique, it is further indicated numerically that up to 34% SE improvement can be achieved, as compared to the counterparts.