Freshness-Aware Constrained Sensing-Aided Beam Prediction with Knowledge Distillation
Beam prediction leveraging environmental data reduces over-the-air beam training overhead. Existing frameworks, however, assume continuous access to fresh sensory data, an assumption that breaks down under sensing budget constraints or sensor failures. To make this more practical, this paper proposes a sensing-aided beam prediction framework that operates under an average sensing rate constraint. We incorporate the age of information (AoI) directly into the beam prediction pipeline as a synthetic input modality: the age of the most recently captured data is encoded and fused with visual features through a gating mechanism. This provides the predictor with explicit context information about input sensory data reliability. We formalize and examine three fixed sampling policies, accumulated, uniform, and randomized, under the average sensing budget. We further develop a knowledge distillation (KD) framework that operates as a robustness regularizer rather than a pure model compression method. In particular, the high-capacity teacher is trained unconstrained on fully sampled data, and its representational knowledge is transferred to a compact student deployed under the sensing budget. We conduct numerical experiments on the DeepSense 6G data set. The results show that AoI fusion nearly doubles top-1 accuracy at strict sensing budgets, and age-aware models achieve near-optimal top-3 accuracy with only 20% of the data. Furthermore, we find that the teacher training regime is a more consequential design choice than the distillation loss function.