Intelligent Beamforming and Handover via Physics-Informed Beam-Aware CKM Diffusion

Abstract: Downlink communications from base stations (BSs) to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in sixth-generation (6G) networks require precise beam alignment to overcome severe mobile communication path loss. However, traditional exhaustive beam sweeping relies on discrete codebooks and consumes valuable air-interface resources for online measurements, rendering it inefficient for highly dynamic aerial environments. In this paper, we propose BeamCKMDiff, a physics-informed generative diffusion framework designed to construct high-fidelity continuous beam-aware channel knowledge maps (BeamCKMs). Unlike existing empirical approaches, BeamCKMDiff employs a diffusion transformer (DiT) architecture featuring a dual-path conditioning mechanism. It integrates an analytical line-of-sight (LoS) beam prior with environmental topologies, while simultaneously embedding continuous beamforming vectors through an adaptive layer normalization (adaLN) mechanism. Building upon this differentiable generative mapping, we propose a CKM-based end-to-end continuous beamforming and proactive dual-BS handover algorithm. By analytically propagating gradients through the reverse diffusion process, the proposed framework enables successive convex approximation (SCA)-based beamforming optimization in the computational domain, effectively bypassing physical pilot scanning. Simulation results demonstrate that BeamCKMDiff achieves a normalized mean square error (NMSE) of --23.96 dB, establishing a highly reliable spatial prior. Compared to discrete beam sweeping and LoS-assumed baselines, the proposed CKM-based beamforming adapts to non-LoS (NLoS) conditions, providing accurate beam alignment and higher spectral efficiency. Furthermore, the integrated dual-BS handover mechanism eliminates blockage-induced link outages, ensuring robust connectivity for high-mobility aerial platforms.