To gain panoramic awareness of spectrum coverage in complex wireless environments, data-driven learning approaches have recently been introduced for radio map estimation (RME). While existing deep learning based methods conduct RME given spectrum measurements gathered from dispersed sensors in the region of interest, they rely on centralized data at a fusion center, which however raises critical concerns on data privacy leakages and high communication overloads. Federated learning (FL) enhance data security and communication efficiency in RME by allowing multiple clients to collaborate in model training without directly sharing local data. However, the performance of the FL-based RME can be hindered by the problem of task heterogeneity across clients due to their unavailable or inaccurate landscaping information. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a physics-inspired distributed RME solution in the absence of landscaping information. The main idea is to develop a novel distributed RME framework empowered by leveraging the domain knowledge of radio propagation models, and by designing a new distributed learning approach that splits the entire RME model into two modules. A global autoencoder module is shared among clients to capture the common pathloss influence on radio propagation pattern, while a client-specific autoencoder module focuses on learning the individual features produced by local shadowing effects from the unique building distributions in local environment. Simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms the benchmarks in achieving higher performance.

Radio map estimation (RME) involves spatial interpolation of radio measurements to predict metrics such as the received signal strength at locations where no measurements were collected. The most popular estimators nowadays project the measurement locations to a regular grid and complete the resulting measurement tensor with a convolutional deep neural network. Unfortunately, these approaches suffer from poor spatial resolution and require a great number of parameters. The first contribution of this paper addresses these limitations by means of an attention-based estimator named Spatial TransfOrmer for Radio Map estimation (STORM). This scheme not only outperforms the existing estimators, but also exhibits lower computational complexity, translation equivariance, rotation equivariance, and full spatial resolution. The second contribution is an extended transformer architecture that allows STORM to perform active sensing, by which the next measurement location is selected based on the previous measurements. This is particularly useful for minimization of drive tests (MDT) in cellular networks, where operators request user equipment to collect measurements. Finally, STORM is extensively validated by experiments with one ray-tracing and two real-measurement datasets.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems typically perform poorly in urban environments, where the likelihood of line-of-sight conditions between devices and satellites is low. Therefore, alternative location methods are required to achieve good accuracy. We present LocUNet: A convolutional, end-to-end trained neural network (NN) for the localization task, which is able to estimate the position of a user from the received signal strength (RSS) of a small number of Base Stations (BS). Using estimations of pathloss radio maps of the BSs and the RSS measurements of the users to be localized, LocUNet can localize users with state-of-the-art accuracy and enjoys high robustness to inaccuracies in the estimations of radio maps. The proposed method does not require generating RSS fingerprints of each specific area where the localization task is performed and is suitable for real-time applications. Moreover, two novel datasets that allow for numerical evaluations of RSS and ToA methods in realistic urban environments are presented and made publicly available for the research community. By using these datasets, we also provide a fair comparison of state-of-the-art RSS and ToA-based methods in the dense urban scenario and show numerically that LocUNet outperforms all the compared methods. Ron Levie is with the Faculty of Mathematics, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, 3200003 Haifa, Israel (e-mail: levieron@technion.ac.il). Gitta Kutyniok is with the Department of Mathematics, LMU Munich, 80331 München, Germany, and also with the Department of Physics and Technology, University of Tromsø, 9019 Tromsø, Norway (e-mail: kutyniok@math.lmu.de). Giuseppe Caire is with the Institute of Telecommunication Systems, TU Berlin, 10623 Berlin, Germany (e-mail: caire@tuberlin.de). A short version of this paper was presented in the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2022) in Singapore [1]. The location information of a User Equipment (UE) is essential for many current and envisioned applications that range from emergency 911 services [2], autonomous driving [3], intelligent transportation systems [4], proof of witness presence [5], 5G networks [6], to social networks, asset tracking and advertising [7], just to name a few. In urban environments, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) alone may fail to provide a reliable localization estimate due to the lack of line-of-sight conditions between the UE and the GNSS satellites [8]. In addition, the continuous reception and detection of GNSS signals is one of the dominating factors in battery consumption for hand-held devices.

Abstract: Outdoor radio map estimation is an important tool for network planning and resource management in modern Internet of Things (IoT) and cellular systems. Radio map describes spatial signal strength distribution and provides network coverage information. A practical goal is to estimate fine-resolution radio maps from sparse radio strength measurements. However, non-uniformly positioned measurements and access obstacles can make it difficult for accurate radio map estimation (RME) and spectrum planning in many outdoor environments. In this work, we develop a two-phase learning framework for radio map estimation by integrating radio propagation model and designing a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN).

In this paper, we study the localization problem in dense urban settings. In such environments, Global Navigation Satellite Systems fail to provide good accuracy due to low likelihood of line-of-sight (LOS) links between the receiver (Rx) to be located and the satellites, due to the presence of obstacles like the buildings. Thus, one has to resort to other technologies, which can reliably operate under non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. Recently, we proposed a Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprint and convolutional neural network-based algorithm, LocUNet, and demonstrated its state-of-the-art localization performance with respect to the widely adopted k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm, and to state-of-the-art time of arrival (ToA) ranging-based methods. In the current work, we first recognize LocUNet's ability to learn the underlying prior distribution of the Rx position or Rx and transmitter (Tx) association preferences from the training data, and attribute its high performance to these. Conversely, we demonstrate that classical methods based on probabilistic approach, can greatly benefit from an appropriate incorporation of such prior information. Our studies also numerically prove LocUNet's close to optimal performance in many settings, by comparing it with the theoretically optimal formulations.