C OMMUNICATIONS T HEORIES & S YSTEMS
Fully Connected Feedforward Neural Networks Based CSI
Feedback Algorithm
Ming Gao* , Tanming Liao, Yubin Lu
School of Telecommunication Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
*
The corresponding author, email: mgao@mail.xidian.edu.cn
Abstract: In modern wireless communication sys-
tems, the accurate acquisition of channel state infor-
mation (CSI) is critical to the performance of beam-
forming, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA),
etc. However, with the application of massive MIMO
in 5G, the number of antennas increases by hun-
dreds or even thousands times, which leads to exces-
sive feedback overhead and poses a huge challenge to
the conventional channel state information feedback
scheme. In this paper, by using deep learning technol-
ogy, we develop a system framework for CSI feedback
based on fully connected feedforward neural networks
(FCFNN), named CF-FCFNN. Through learning the
training set composed of CSI, CF-FCFNN is able to
recover the original CSI from the compressed CSI
more accurately compared with the existing method
based on deep learning without increasing the algo-
rithm complexity.
Keywords: massive MIMO; CSI feedback; deep
learning; fully connected feedforward neural network
I. INTRODUCTION
AS one of the critical candidate technologies of 5G
wireless communication [1], massive MIMO can fur-
ther improve the transmission efficiency and capacity
of wireless communication systems and effectively re-
duce the interference between users and the energy
consumption of the receiver or transmitter by deploy-
ing a large number of antennas at the base station (BS)
Received: May 28, 2020
Revised: Aug. 5, 2020
Editor: Wei Duan
China Communication · January 2021
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side [2]. However, to fully utilize the potential gains of
massive MIMO, knowledge of channel state informa-
tion (CSI) at the BS is essential. For example, many
works about NOMA have assumed perfect CSI or the
order of the instantaneous channel gain which can ob-
tained from CSI feedback [3–5]. However, imperfect
CSI will seriously affect the performance of NOMA
system [6–8]. Due to the rapid increase of feedback
overhead in massive MIMO systems, the conventional
CSI feedback methods are difficult to apply to massive
MIMO systems. As a result, many researches have
been motivated to reduce the CSI feedback overhead
in massive MIMO systems [9–13]. In these efforts,
[9–12] mainly uses the spatial or temporal correlation
of the massive MIMO system to reduce the feedback
overhead. Specifically, these methods design the algo-
rithm based on the idea of compressed sensing (CS),
which converts the channel matrix into a sparse vec-
tor that can be sparsely represented on some orthogo-
nal basis. Then, the sparse vector is compressed and
reconstructed so as to reduce the feedback overhead.
However, in practice, the sparse vector of the channel
matrix is only approximately sparse on certain orthog-
onal basis, such as two-dimensional discrete Fourier
transform(2D-DFT) and two-dimensional discrete co-
sine transform (2D-DCT). This insufficient sparsity
makes it difficult for the recovery algorithm in CS to
recover the channel matrix accurately from the sparse
vector.
In [13], a novel CSI feedback scheme based on
deep learning is proposed. The compression and re-
construction process of channel matrix is fulfilled by
a neural network called CsiNet, which is similar to the
43
 autoencoder [14]. By learning the characteristics of where hk ∈ C Nt ×1 , xk ∈ C and nk ∈ C denote
the channel matrix from the training set, this scheme the channel vector, transmit data symbol and addi-
can recover CSI with greatly improved reconstruction tive noise of the kth subcarrier, respectively, wk ∈
quality compared with existing CS-based methods. C Nt ×1 denotes the beamforming or precoding vector
In this paper, in order to further improve the re- designed by the BS based on the downlink CSI. By
construction accuracy of the channel matrix, we con- sequentially stacking Nc channel vectors, the channel
sider using the fully connected-feedforward neural matrix in the spatial-frequency domain is represented
networks (FC-FNN) to build a CSI feedback network, as H = [h1 , h2 , · · ·, hNc ] ∈ C Nt ×Nc .
named CF-FCFNN. Different from the CsiNet built by To reduce the feedback overhead and the complexity
a convolution neural network (CNN) which is more of the training set, we transform the spatial-frequency
suitable for image processing, CF-FCFNN built by domain channel matrix H into the angle-delay domain
FC-FNN can extract spatial features sufficiently, so channel matrix H 0 through 2D-DFT as follows:
as to further improve the reconstruction performance.
The simulation results show that the reconstruction H 0 = Ds HDf , (2)
quality of CF-FCFNN is better than CsiNet. In addi-
tion, our proposed network architecture is comparable where Ds ∈ C Nt ×Nt and Df ∈ C Nc ×Nc are both 2D-
to CsiNet in terms of the algorithm runtime. DFT matrices. Due to limited multipath time delay,
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Sec- only the first N c0 (N c0 < Nc ) columns of H 0 contain
tion II provides the system model for CSI feedback we values. Therefore, within allowable range of accuracy,
0
considered in this paper. Section III explains the ar- we can truncate H 0 into H 00 ∈ C N t×Nc by retaining
chitecture of CF-FCFNN and the deep learning algo- the first N c0 columns of H 0 and removing remaining
rithms we used in detail. Simulation results that verify columns. The conversion from H to H 00 is called pre-
the effectiveness of CF-FCFNN are presented in Sec- processing. In the research, we focused on designing
tion IV. Finally, Section V provides the conclusions. the CSI encoder and the CSI decoder with excellent
performance. The CSI encoder is used to transform the
II. SYSTEM MODEL preprocessed complex channel matrix H 00 into an M-
dimensional (M  N, N = Ntotal = 2 × Nt × N 0 c)
Consider a flat slow-fading downlink massive MIMO compressed vector v, that is,
system with Nt transmit antennas at a BS and a single
receive antenna at a UE operating in the FDD mode. It v = CSIEncoder(H 00 ). (3)
is assumed that the UE can obtain a perfect downlink
channel matrix by pilot-based training [15]. The chan- The data compression ratio is defined as follows:
nel feedback model of single-user MIMO system is
shown in Figure 1. The system is operated in orthogo-
CR = M/N . (4)
Base Station

Precoding

CSI
H UE
Channel
Preprocessing
CSI Then the compressed vector v is sent to the BS
˜˜˜

Decoder Estimation Encoder

through the feedback link by the UE. The CSI decoder
Nt
is used to reconstruct H 00 from the compressed vector
Feedback Channel
v at BS, and the reconstructed channel matrix is repre-
sented by H b 00 , that is,
Figure 1. The channel feedback model of single-user MIMO
system.
b 00 = CSIDecoder(v).
H (5)
nal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) over Nc
subcarriers. The received signal at the kth subcarrier Finally, the original spatial-frequency domain chan-
can be expressed as follows: nel matrix H is obtained by sequentially perform-
ing zero-padding and two-dimensional inverse dis-
yk = hH
k wk xk + nk , (1) crete Fourier transform (2D-IDFT) on H 00 . The encod-

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 CSI
Encoder
UE Feedback link
M×1
the real and imaginary
parts of channel matrix Compressed vector
˄2,32,32˅
v
N×1
reshape
Dense; Sigmoid
Dense; LeakyReLU(alpha=0.3)
copy
Figure 2. The CSI feedback network based on the fully connected feedforward neural network
ing process and decoding process can be understood as
the operation of compressing and reconstructing the
complex channel matrix H respectively.
III. CF-FCFNN
We develop a CSI feedback network based on fully
connected feedforward neural networks for CSI com-
pression and reconstruction, named CF-FCFNN. The
CSI feedback network based on the fully connected
feedforward neural network is shown in Figure 2.
CF-FCFNN consists of a CSI encoder and a CSI
decoder, which are both built from neural networks.
We exploit the CSI encoder to compress the complex
channel matrix. The CSI encoder consists of an input
layer and an output layer, which are fully connected by
weighting values. We reshape the real and imaginary
parts of the preprocessed complex channel matrix H 00
into a vector with dimension of N (N = 2×Nt ×Nc 0 ),
which serve as the input of the CSI encoder. The out-
put of the CSI encoder is the compressed vector v,
which is obtained by reducing the dimension M of the
output layer.
Once the BS acquires the compressed vector v from
the UE through the feedback link, it uses the CSI de-
coder to reconstruct the original complex channel ma-
trix H 00 from the compressed vector. To fully extract
the feature of the channel matrix, the CSI decoder is
composed of an input layer, several hidden layers and
an output layer. In this paper, we set the number of
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CSI
Decoder
BS
M×1
the real and imaginary
parts of reconstructed
channel matrix
˄2,32,32˅
N×1
hidden layers to six. The input layer of the CSI de-
coder is composed of M neurons that considers the
compressed vector as input and outputs a vector of
size N , which serves as an input of subsequent hid-
den layers. For the number of neural network lay-
ers in CF-FCFNN is directly related to performance
of CF-FCFNN, we introduce the residual block of the
deep residual network [16, 17] into the CSI decoder
to avoid the degradation of the performance caused
by the depth of CF-FCFNN. Consider splitting the six
hidden layers into two residual blocks, each of which
consists of three hidden layers. In each residual block,
there is a shortcut connection between the first layer
and the third layer, so as to pass data flow to later
layers directly. Besides, the activation function be-
tween the neural network layers of the two residuals
blocks is set as the leaky version of a rectified linear
unit (LeakyReLU), that is,
n
x, if x>0,
LeakyReLU (x) = αx, otherwise, (6)
where α ∈ (0, 1). After two residual blocks, the CSI
decoder outputs the reconstruction of H 00 , which is
b 00 .
represented by H
We determine the number of hidden layers and
residual blocks of the neural network in CF-FCFNN
through experiments. The experimental results show
that six hidden layers and two residual blocks can
achieve good recovery performance. Further increas-
45
 ing the hidden layers of CF-FCFNN or the number of Table 1. NMSE in dB, Cosine Similarity and Runtime in ms.
residual blocks will not significantly improve the qual- Feedback NMSE Runtime
ity of recovery, but will increase the computational Scenario CR
Model (dB) (ms)
complexity. CsiNet −18.71 0.99 1.3
1/4
CF-FCFNN −20.07 0.99 1.1
In addition, in order to accelerate the convergence CsiNet −14.05 0.98 1.3
1/8
speed of network, we introduce batch normalization CF-FCFNN −15.14 0.98 1.1
CsiNet −8.87 0.94 1.3
[18] to all layers in CF-FCFNN, which maps each Indoor 1/16
CF-FCFNN −12.35 0.97 1.1
layer of input to [0, 1]. Therefore, the output layer will CsiNet −7.88 0.92 1.3
1/32
map the output value to [0, 1] using the sigmoid func- CF-FCFNN −8.86 0.93 1.1
CsiNet −4.88 0.82 1.3
tion in the CSI decoder. 1/64
CF-FCFNN −6.6 0.89 1.1
To obtain all the weight and bias values of the CSI 1/4
CsiNet −9.01 0.92 1.3
CF-FCFNN −11.61 0.95 1.1
encoder and CSI decoder, we train them with end-to-
CsiNet −7.2 0.89 1.3
end learning methods of deep learning. We use f () 1/8
CF-FCFNN −10.08 0.93 1.1
to represent a well-trained CF-FCFNN, with CSI en- CsiNet −4.8 0.81 1.3
Outdoor 1/16
CF-FCFNN −9.12 0.92 1.1
coder fen and CSI decoder fde . When the input of CsiNet −3.14 0.71 1.3
1/32
CFN-FCFNN is H 00 , the reconstructed channel matrix CF-FCFNN −8.42 0.91 1.1
CsiNet −2.02 0.59 1.3
can be represented as follows: 1/64
CF-FCFNN −7.25 0.88 1.1

b 00 = f (H 00 ; W, b)
H
(7) obtain H 00 with dimension of 32 × 32. The training,
= fde (fen (H 00 ; Wen , ben ); Wde , bde ),
validation and testing sets contain 100000, 30000, and
20000 samples for offline training or online testing re-
where Wen and ben denote the set of weights and bi-
spectively. The epochs, learning rate and batch size
ases for the CSI encoder respectively, Wen and ben
are set as 1000, 0.001, and 200, respectively. The al-
denote the set of weights and biases for the CSI de-
pha of LeakyReLU function is set as 0.3. The per-
coder respectively. We choose Adam [19] as the op-
formance of the network architecture is measured by
timized algorithm for updating the set of parameters,
the normalized mean square error(NMSE) and the co-
and use the mean square error (MSE) as the loss func-
sine similarity [13]. The difference between the recon-
tion, which is defined as:
structed channel matrix H b and original channel matrix
T
H is quantified by NMSE, which is defined as follows:
1X c 2
L(W, b) = Ht − Ht 00 , (8)
T t=1 20

2

N M SE = E H −H
b / kHk22 . (9)
2
where T is the number of samples in the training set,
k·k2 is the Euclidean norm. The cosine similarity is defined as follows:
 
IV. SIMULATION RESULTS AND ANALY- 
 1 X Nc c H
hk hk  
SIS ρ=E , (10)
 Nc
 k=1 c
hk khk k2 

In this section, we describe the detailed setup of our 2

experiments and compare our approach with existing

deep learning-based approaches. Referring to the de-
fault settings for all parameters in [20], we gener-
ate channel matrices under two scenarios through the
COST 2100 channel model. We use uniform linear ar-
ray (ULA) with Nt = 32 and Nc = 1024 subcarriers.
In the preprocessing of the spatial-frequency channel
matrix, we only retain the first 32 columns of H 0 to
where hck is the reconstructed channel vector of the kth
subcarrier.
We performed the experiments with CR values of
1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, and 1/64, respectively. In addi-
tion, CsiNet and CF-FCFNN are trained and tested on
the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU. In all exper-
iments, all parameters of CsiNet follow their default

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 setting in [13]. The corresponding NMSE, ρ and run-
time of CsiNet and CF-FCFNN for each CR value are
summarized in Table 1.
It can be seen from the table that the performance
of CF-FCFNN is significantly better than CsiNet with
different CR values, especially in outdoor scenarios.
For example, the reduction of CR will cause distortion
to increase, therefore, ρ will decrease. With the re-
duction of CR, the performance of ρ of CF-FCFNN
scheme is obviously better than CsiNet scheme. Fur-
thermore, the online runtimes of the two networks are
almost the same. Therefore, we conclude that CF-
FCFNN based on fully connected feedforward neural
networks can significantly improve the channel recon-
struction quality without increasing the time complex-
ity.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we propose a novel CSI feedback frame-
work CF-FCFNN by using the fully connected feed-
forward neural networks. The framework can sig-
nificantly improves the channel reconstruction quality
without increasing the time complexity. For accurate
CSI can avoid error propagation effectively in SIC re-
ceivers in NOMA system, it is foreseeable that bet-
ter system performance can be obtained using our CSI
feedback scheme. Furthermore, based on the existing
CSI feedback framework, we believe that if the time
correlation of channels was taken into account, the
performance of channel matrix reconstruction would
be further improved [21]. Therefore, we leave the ex-
ploitation of the time correlation across fast-varying
channels as a topic for future researches.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work was supported by the Key Research and De-
velopment Project of Shaanxi Province under Grant
no.2019ZDLGY07-07.
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Biographies
Ming Gao received the Ph.D. degree in
telecommunications engineering from Xi-
dian University, Xi’an, China, in 2009.
He is currently an associate Professor in
Xidian University. From 2015 to 2016,
he was a visiting scholar at the depart-
ment of electrical engineering and com-
puter science in the University of Ten-
nessee, Knoxville, USA. His research is mainly focused on wire-
less communication, information security and artificial intelli-
gence communication technology.
48
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Tanming Liao received the B.S. de-
gree in electronic information engineer-
ing from Anhui University of Finance and
Economics, Bengbu, China, in 2017 and
is currently working toward the M.S. de-
gree in electronics and communication
engineering at Xidian University, Xi’an,
China. His research is mainly focus on ar-
tificial intelligence communication technology.
Yubin Lu received the B.S. degree
in Communication Engineering from
Taiyuan University of Technology,
Shanxi, China, in 2018 and is currently
working toward the M.S. degree in elec-
tronics and communication engineering
at Xidian University, Xi an, China. Her
research is mainly focus on authentication
protocol for RFID.
China Communication · January 2021