PRB-WM: Physics-Regularized Beta World Models for Predictive Link Adaptation on Real Time-Varying Underwater Acoustic Channels

Abstract

Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) improves the spectral efficiency of underwater acoustic (UWA) links, but its feedback is inevitably stale: sound propagates slowly, and by the time channel state information (CSI) arrives, the fast time-varying multipath channel has moved on. Predictive link adaptation therefore needs more than a point forecast: it needs a distribution over each candidate action's consequences. We propose PRB-WM, a physics-regularized Beta world model for predictive per-subcarrier link adaptation on real time-varying UWA channels. A persistence-anchored stochastic latent-space dynamics model learns how the channel evolves; a counterfactual outcome head evaluates, for every candidate modulation and coding scheme (MCS), a Beta-binomial distribution of bit errors on shared imagined futures; and a chance-constrained receding-horizon model predictive controller maximizes expected spectral efficiency subject to a bounded probability of violating the bit error rate (BER) target. To the best of our knowledge, PRB-WM is the first world model for UWA communications. In closed-loop replay of six measured sea-trial links from the public UWA Channel Library against a 24-method pool spanning the full methodological spectrum, PRB-WM attains a mean goodput 87% above the strongest baseline, ranks first on all six time-varying links at the longest lookahead, and is the only method whose realized frame risk decreases systematically with lookahead, meeting the BER-violation contract where no baseline does. Ablations confirm that rollout sampling dispersion is essential to the chance constraint and that the physics anchor is necessary for trainability.