Site Geometry and Calibration Uncertainties in Digital Twin-enabled Channel Estimation

Lorenzo Del Moro, Francesco Linsalata, Umberto Spagnolini, Maurizio Magarini

Fast ray tracing (RT) has stimulated the Digital Twin (DT) as an emerging technology for environment-aware communications. Since wireless propagation is governed by the interaction between site geometry and electromagnetic (EM) properties of the environment, DT-based approaches can provide site-specific prior information for channel estimation. In this work, we investigate the robustness of DT to aid the channel estimation, where multipath features extracted via RT are used to construct the low-rank (LR) eigenstructure of the channel covariance matrix. This LR structure is used in channel estimation. However, the digital representation of propagation model is inaccurate and thus it affects the LR. We explicitly analyze these model mismatches that arise from user positioning errors, which translate into geometric inconsistencies in the site representation, and EM material calibration errors. We derive a first-order perturbative model that separates geometric perturbations, affecting angles and delays, from EM perturbations, affecting path gains. Based on this perturbed model, we provide a normalized mean-square error (NMSE) analysis that reveals a fundamental difference between geometric and EM perturbations. In particular, we show that LR estimation is inherently robust to EM calibration perturbations, while positioning errors, dominate performance degradation by altering the channel eigenstructure. Numerical results confirm that, in urban, suburban and rural scenarios, positioning errors are the primary limiting factor, whereas EM calibration errors have a comparatively limited impact. Despite these mismatches, DT-empowered estimators provide up to 10dB NMSE improvement, over baseline methods, in the urban low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) settings, while achieving performance comparable to baseline estimators at high SNR for moderate (< 1 m) positioning errors.