Generative-Adversarial-Network-Based Wireless Channel Modeling: Challenges and Opportunities

In modern wireless communication systems, wireless channel modeling has always been a fundamental task in system design and performance optimization. Traditional channel modeling methods, such as ray-tracing and geometry- based stochastic channel models, require in-depth domain-specific knowledge and technical expertise in radio signal propagations across electromagnetic fields. To avoid these difficulties and complexities, a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) framework is proposed for the first time to address the problem of autonomous wireless channel modeling without complex theoretical analysis or data processing. Specifically, the GAN is trained by raw measurement data to reach the Nash equilibrium of a MinMax game between a channel data generator and a channel data discriminator. Once this process converges, the resulting channel data generator is extracted as the target channel model for a specific application scenario. To demonstrate, the distribution of a typical additive white Gaussian noise channel is successfully approximated by using the proposed GAN-based channel modeling framework, thus verifying its good performance and effectiveness.