GeNeRT: A Physics-Informed Approach to Intelligent Wireless Channel Modeling via Generalizable Neural Ray Tracing
Authors: Kejia Bian, Meixia Tao, Shu Sun, Tongjia Zhang, Jun Yu
Organizations: School of Information Science and Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China · Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai 200231, China
Neural ray tracing (RT) has emerged as a promising paradigm for channel modeling by integrating physical propagation principles with neural networks. However, existing neural RT methods remain limited by strong spatial dependence and weak adherence to electromagnetic laws. We propose GeNeRT, a generalizable neural RT framework that improves generalization and accuracy through relative geometric features, scatterer semantics, and a Fresnel-inspired polarization-driven architecture. GeNeRT is trained through a three-stage strategy: polarization-specific module-wise pre-training captures general ray-surface interaction behavior; system-wise end-to-end training uses only receiver-side channel impulse responses to learn site-specific propagation characteristics; and measurement-based fine-tuning employs sparse measured multipath components (MPCs) to adapt polarization-related modules to real-world environments. Extensive outdoor simulations demonstrate robust intra-scenario transferability and inter-scenario zero-shot generalization. In an unseen scenario, GeNeRT achieves an overall error of −35.36 dB and an average-delay error of 4.91 ns, compared with −10.85 dB and 32.38 ns for the best baseline. With only 75 measured reflected MPCs, fine-tuning further reduces the overall error from −14.48 to −22.90 dB and the average-delay error from 6.28 to 3.58 ns. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and training strategy.
Explicit neural representations such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enable high-fidelity and real-time novel view synthesis, yet optimize for alpha-composited optical appearance rather than ray-intersectable geometry. In contrast, radio-frequency (RF) digital twins require deterministic multi-bounce paths, where the geometry dictates trajectories and their associated attenuation and delay. We introduce a framework enabling differentiable RF propagation simulation directly within visually reconstructed neural scenes, allowing point-to-point path computation between arbitrary 3D locations while preserving high-quality visual rendering. Unlike conventional RF simulation pipelines that rely on manually constructed meshes, we embed Gaussian primitives into a hardware-accelerated ray tracing structure as the underlying spatial representation. By extracting physically meaningful channel impulse responses from visual-only reconstructions, we provide cross-modal evidence that neural reconstructions can serve as unified spatial representations for both electromagnetic propagation simulation and photorealistic view synthesis.
Radio frequency (RF) maps provide a compact representation of multipath propagation characteristics and are fundamental to channel modeling, coverage analysis, and environment-aware wireless optimization. This paper proposes a unified RF map construction framework based on a physics-informed neural network (PINN) and a graph neural network (GNN), supporting both cross-scene generation and in-scene completion with 2D and 2.5D environmental representations. The PINN embeds electromagnetic propagation constraints to establish a physically consistent mapping from receiver locations to multipath parameters, including path gain, time of arrival, and angles, while the GNN enforces spatial consistency by modeling correlations among neighboring receivers. To comprehensively evaluate multipath reconstruction quality, we propose a peak-weighted dynamic time warping metric that jointly accounts for amplitude errors and peak delay misalignment in channel impulse responses. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms image-based, diffusion-based, and interpolation baselines across both map-level and multipath-level metrics, achieving robust generalization and high-fidelity RF map construction under sparse observations.
TR 38.901-based channel models such as Sionna are reliable, but generating many multi-user channel realizations remains expensive. This paper asks a practical question: can a trained generative model produce multi-user TR 38.901 channels faster than Sionna without losing the spatial correlations imposed by user geometry? To answer this question, we propose a physics-aware, geometry-conditioned SetGAN trained on Sionna reference data. The method separates large-scale received power from normalized small-scale fading, compresses the latter with principal component analysis, and learns the conditional channel distribution in a latent space while preserving geometry-dependent correlations. On the UMa/NLoS benchmark, the model keeps the received-power distributions close to the reference, with about 0.41 dB Wasserstein distance, and reproduces spatial-consistency profiles with mean deviations below 0.03 on median curves versus distance. In addition, it reduces elapsed generation time by a factor of 3.45 and CPU-total cost by a factor of 6.15 relative to Sionna under matched user positions in the fixed-position CPU-vs-CPU benchmark. These results show that a trained generative model can substantially accelerate TR 38.901 channel generation without breaking the spatial consistency needed to evaluate multi-user systems.
Mauro Gonzalo Tarazona-Levano, David Lopez-Perez, Nicola Piovesan +1