Deep Transfer Learning for Cross-Device Channel Classification in mmWave Wireless

Identifying whether the wireless channel between two devices (e.g., a base station and a client device) is Line-of-Sight (LoS) or non-Line-of-Sight (nLoS) has many applications, e.g., it can be used in device localization. Prior works have addressed this problem, but they are primarily limited to sub-6 GHz systems, assume sophisticated radios on the devices, incur additional communication overhead, and/or are specific to a single class of devices (e.g., a specific smartphone). In this paper, we address this channel classification problem for wireless devices with mmWave radios. Specifically, we show that existing beamforming training messages that are exchanged periodically between mmWave wireless devices can also be used in a deep learning model to solve the channel classification problem with no additional overhead. We then extend our work by developing a transfer learning model (t-LNCC) that is trained on simulated data, and can successfully solve the channel classification problem on any commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) mmWave device with/without any real-world labeled data. The accuracy of t-LNCC is more than 95% across three different COTS wireless devices, when there is a small sample of labeled data for each device. We finally show the application of our classification problem in estimating the distance between two wireless devices, which can be used in localization.