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

TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometry-aware, uncertainty-guided approach for reconstructing sparse radio maps in urban environments, leveraging a new benchmark and active sensing to improve accuracy with limited measurements.

Contribution

It proposes GeoUQ-GFNet, a lightweight network that jointly predicts dense radio maps and uncertainty, and introduces UrbanRT-RM, a diverse urban ray-tracing benchmark for evaluation.

Findings

GeoUQ-GFNet achieves strong reconstruction performance across various urban scenes.

Uncertainty-guided measurement selection outperforms non-adaptive sampling.

The combined approach effectively reconstructs radio maps with limited measurements.

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.