Sparse Channel Acquisition in Aging Fluid Antenna Systems: A Reliability-Calibrated Posterior Reconstruction Approach
Fluid antenna systems (FASs) exploit port-domain diversity within a compact aperture, but their gain can be lost if the receiver has to scan too many ports before data transmission. This paper studies sparse channel acquisition for aging FAS receivers, where the available information has mixed reliability: current observations are fresh but sparse, whereas historical channel state information (CSI) is dense but stale due to Doppler-induced temporal decorrelation. We formulate the problem from a communication perspective by linking aperture-field reconstruction to port-selection rate, outage, probing budget, and online inference latency. We then cast the acquisition task as reliability-calibrated posterior reconstruction, in which the sparse current observations serve as hard measurement evidence and historical CSI is reused only as soft temporal side information. The resulting reliability-controlled conditional diffusion posterior (DCP) framework conditions the denoising process on the sparse current observations, the observation mask, and the historical CSI, and refines the reverse trajectory through observation consistency, mismatch-aware temporal gating, spatial trust weighting, progressive temporal activation, and warm initialization. Analysis shows how aging and reconstruction error induce rate distortion and rate regret. Simulations across probing budgets, signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), temporal correlations, observation patterns, ablation settings, and latency tests show consistent reconstruction gains with millisecond-level online inference latency, indicating that stale CSI can be beneficial when its strength, timing, and spatial support are explicitly controlled.