Calibrating the Digital Twin Channel: Statistics-Consistent Sim-to-Lab Adaptation for W-Band Industrial OFDM Links

Abstract

Digital twins (DTs) can reduce over-the-air validation cost in industrial wireless networks, but their utility depends on the fidelity of the underlying channel twin (CT). At W-band, site-specific ray tracing captures deterministic propagation geometry, yet its channel frequency responses (CFRs) do not reproduce the small-scale impairments and capture-to-capture variability observed in laboratory orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) measurements above 90 GHz. This paper proposes Statistics-Consistent Sim-to-Lab Adaptation (SC-SLA), a calibration framework that improves the fidelity of a 95 GHz Sionna ray-traced CT toward that of the testbed by aligning the mean power delay profile (PDP), the distribution of root-mean-square delay spread ($\tau_{\mathrm{rms}}$), and per-subcarrier statistics at 50 MHz sampling bandwidth. SC-SLA uses a generative adversarial network (GAN)-inspired, cycle-consistent architecture with ResNet generators and batch-level channel-statistics losses on the PDP, sub-band PDP, $\tau_{\mathrm{rms}}$ moments and quantiles, and normalized mean-square error (NMSE) of the mean CFR-magnitude profile. The framework is non-adversarial and requires neither paired simulated/measured samples nor discriminators. On held-out 95 GHz data, SC-SLA reduces the $\tau_{\mathrm{rms}}$ Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) statistic from 0.86 to 0.050 relative to the impairment-augmented ray-traced input, and by 44% (from 0.089 to 0.050) relative to the strongest of four supervised baselines (FCNN, CNN1D, BiLSTM, and UNet1D). Without retraining, the same checkpoint also generalizes to 92-94 GHz carriers, where it achieves the lowest PDP and CFR-magnitude errors among all baselines while reducing the $\tau_{\mathrm{rms}}$-distribution mismatch relative to the uncalibrated twin.