PropSplat: Map-Free RF Field Reconstruction via 3D Gaussian Propagation Splatting

TL;DR

PropSplat is a map-free RF propagation modeling method that reconstructs radio environments using 3D Gaussian splatting, achieving high accuracy without detailed geographic data or maps.

Contribution

We introduce PropSplat, a novel map-free RF field reconstruction technique using 3D Gaussian primitives optimized end-to-end, outperforming existing methods on real-world datasets.

Findings

PropSplat achieves 5.38 dB RMSE on outdoor datasets with 300m measurement spacing.

It attains 0.19m localization error indoors, outperforming NeRF$^2$ by an order of magnitude.

PropSplat matches or exceeds the accuracy of methods requiring detailed geographic data.

Abstract

Building a site-specific propagation model typically requires either ray-tracing over detailed 3D maps or dense measurement campaigns. Both approaches are expensive and often infeasible for rapid deployments where geographic data is unavailable or outdated. We present PropSplat, a map-free propagation modeling method that reconstructs radio frequency (RF) fields using 3D anisotropic Gaussian primitives. Each Gaussian encodes a scalar path loss offset relative to an explicit baseline path loss model with a learnable path loss exponent. Gaussians are initialized along observed transmitter--receiver paths and optimized end-to-end to learn the propagation environment without external information like floor plans, terrain databases, or clutter data. We evaluate PropSplat against wireless radiance field methods NeRF$^2$, GSRF, and WRF-GS+ on two real-world datasets. On large-scale outdoor drive-tests spanning multiple topographical regions at six sub-6 GHz frequencies, PropSplat achieves 5.38 dB RMSE when training measurements are spaced 300m apart and outperforms WRF-GS+ (5.87 dB), GSRF (7.46 dB), and NeRF$^2$ (14.76 dB). On indoor Bluetooth Low Energy measurements, PropSplat achieves 0.19m mean localization error, an order of magnitude better than NeRF$^2$ (1.84m), while achieving near-identical received signal strength prediction accuracy. These results show that accurate site-specific propagation reconstruction is achievable from sparse RF-native measurements. The need for geographic data as a prerequisite for scalable RF environment modeling is reduced.