Sparse Gain Radio Map Reconstruction With Geometry Priors and Uncertainty-Guided Measurement Selection

arXiv cs.CV / 4/8/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses sparse radio gain map reconstruction in challenging urban settings where dense sensing is impractical due to blockages, irregular geometry, and limited access to measurements.
  • It introduces UrbanRT-RM, a controllable ray-tracing benchmark that provides diverse urban layouts, multiple base-station deployments, and several sparse sampling modes for fair evaluation.
  • The proposed GeoUQ-GFNet model jointly predicts a dense gain radio map and a spatial uncertainty map using sparse measurements along with structured geometry priors.
  • The work uses the predicted uncertainty to drive active measurement selection, showing that uncertainty-guided querying improves reconstruction more than non-adaptive sampling under the same sensing budget.
  • Experimental results report consistent performance across different scenes and transmitter placements generated with UrbanRT-RM, highlighting the value of combining geometry-aware learning, uncertainty estimation, and benchmark-driven evaluation.

Abstract

Radio maps are important for environment-aware wireless communication, network planning, and radio resource optimization. However, dense radio map construction remains challenging when only a limited number of measurements are available, especially in complex urban environments with strong blockages, irregular geometry, and restricted sensing accessibility. Existing methods have explored interpolation, low-rank cartography, deep completion, and channel knowledge map (CKM) construction, but many of these methods insufficiently exploit explicit geometric priors or overlook the value of predictive uncertainty for subsequent sensing. In this paper, we study sparse gain radio map reconstruction from a geometry-aware and active sensing perspective. We first construct \textbf{UrbanRT-RM}, a controllable ray-tracing benchmark with diverse urban layouts, multiple base-station deployments, and multiple sparse sampling modes. We then propose \textbf{GeoUQ-GFNet}, a lightweight network that jointly predicts a dense gain radio map and a spatial uncertainty map from sparse measurements and structured scene priors. The predicted uncertainty is further used to guide active measurement selection under limited sensing budgets. Extensive experiments show that our proposed GeoUQ-GFNet method achieves strong and consistent reconstruction performance across different scenes and transmitter placements generated using UrbanRT-RM. Moreover, uncertainty-guided querying provides more effective reconstruction improvement than non-adaptive sampling under the same additional measurement budget. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining geometry-aware learning, uncertainty estimation, and benchmark-driven evaluation for sparse radio map reconstruction in complex urban environments.