ARGUS: Cross-Antenna Channel Estimation and Intelligent Antenna Selection for Massive MIMO

Massive MIMO has emerged as a cornerstone technology for 5G-Advanced and future 6G networks, yet its practical deployment remains limited by hardware cost and power consumption. Switch-based architectures, which share a small number of RF chains among many antenna elements, provide a scalable alternative, but create a new bottleneck: only a subset of antennas is observable at any given moment, leaving the channel state of the remaining elements unknown. Lacking this information prevents the system from exploiting advanced physical-layer functions such as digital beamforming or multi-stream MIMO. In this paper, we present ARGUS, a generative channel reconstruction framework that infers the CSI of unobserved antennas from partial observations. The key idea is that all antenna responses are governed by the same underlying wireless propagation environment, enabling the task to be formulated as a generative inference problem. We employ a variational autoencoder to capture the latent spatial structure and reconstruct unobserved channels through sampling. Extensive experiments show that our reconstructed CSI incurs less than 2.5% achievable rate loss, and real-world measurements demonstrate a more than 90% antenna-selection match rate, confirming the practicality of the proposed approach.