Organizations: School of Science and Engineering (SSE), the Shenzhen Future Network of Intelligence Institute (FNii-Shenzhen), and the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Future Networks of Intelligence, the Chinese University of Hong Kong at Shenzhen, China, 518066 · School of Advanced Engineering, Great Bay University, Dongguan, China, 523000
Radio maps are essential for efficient radio resource management in future 6G and low-altitude networks. While deep learning (DL) techniques have emerged as an efficient alternative to conventional ray-tracing for radio map estimation (RME), most existing DL approaches are confined to 2D near-ground scenarios. They often fail to capture essential 3D signal propagation characteristics and antenna polarization effects, primarily due to the scarcity of 3D data and training challenges. To address these limitations, we present the RadioGen3D framework. First, we propose an efficient data synthesis method to generate high-quality 3D radio map data. By establishing a parametric target model that captures 2D ray-tracing and 3D channel fading characteristics, we derive realistic coefficient combinations from minimal real measurements, enabling the construction of a large-scale synthetic dataset, Radio3DMix. Utilizing this dataset, we propose a 3D model training scheme based on a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN), yielding a 3D U-Net capable of accurate RME under diverse input feature combinations. Experimental results demonstrate that RadioGen3D surpasses all baselines in both estimation accuracy and speed. Furthermore, fine-tuning experiments verify its strong generalization capability via successful knowledge transfer.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Diagram of the proposed RadioGen3D framework.
Properties
Radio3DMix
Radio3D-RT
UrbanRadio3D [ 24 ]
SpectrumNet [ 31 ]
RadioGAT [ 30 ]
RadioMapSeer [ 7 ]
Dataset Size
50k
5k
140.2k
300k
21k
56k
Height
20
50
20
3
1
1
Map Size
256 × 256
256 × 256
256 × 256
128 × 128
200 × 200
256 × 256
Resolution
1 m / voxel
1 m / voxel
1 m / voxel
10 m / pixel
5 m / pixel
1 m / pixel
Number of Tx
2
1
1
4
3
1
Table I: Comparison of Radio Map Datasets
Parameter
Value
Radio map size
256×256×20m3
Radio map resolution
1×1×1m3
Center carrier frequency
2.4GHz
Number of building maps
200
Number of transmitter sets per building map
10
Number of feasible target models
25
Table II: Parameters of Radio3DMix Dataset
Figure 2: Illustration of 3D channel fading under vertical polarization.
Figure 3: Visualized horizontal slices at different heights. The transmitter is located at height of z=10 m.
Figure 4: Visualized vertical slices with different model coefficients.
Figure 5: The proposed cGAN-based training process in RadioGen3D
Figure 6: Model Structure of Generator and Discriminator
Figure 7: Comparison between predicted results (top row) and ground truth (bottom row) at different heights
Sparse sampling rate
1%
Configuration
Sparse-and-Transmitter
Sparse-Only
Metrics
RMSE
NMSE
SSIM
PSNR
RMSE
NMSE
SSIM
PSNR
RadioGen3D
0.0056
0.0032
0.9965
45.00
0.0062
0.0041
0.9861
44.58
RadioGen3D (Fine-tuning)
0.0278
0.0199
0.9407
31.09
0.0341
0.0265
0.9334
29.33
RadioGen3D (Train on RT Data)
0.0317
0.0245
0.9371
29.76
0.0324
0.0257
0.9316
28.97
GenRadio [ 37 ]
0.1389
/
/
17.152
/
/
/
/
Table III: Performance comparison of different methods under various sampling rate
Figure 8: Comparison between the predicted result (top) and ground truth (bottom) at transmitter locations
Method
Number of Height
Inference Time (sec)
RadioGen3D
20
0.06
RadioDiff-3D
20
1.43
RadioDiff (2D)
1
0.35
RadioUNet (2D)
1
0.033
RME-GAN (2D)
1
0.025
Table IV: Inference time comparison of different methods
Figure 9: Comparison between predicted results (top row) and ground truth (bottom row) at different heights after fine-tuning.
With the emergence of wireless applications in three-dimensional environments, such as the low-altitude airspace and 3D heterogeneous networks, radio map estimation is increasingly required to characterize signal propagation across both horizontal and vertical dimensions. However, extending radio map estimation from 2D to 3D remains challenging due to increased spatial sparsity and limited supervision across continuous altitudes. In this paper, we propose RadioFormer3D, a specialized model for volumetric spectrum reconstruction under weak supervision. Building on the dual-stream, multi-granularity fusion architecture of RadioFormer, RadioFormer3D introduces a Fourier-based sampling encoder and a volumetric decoder to efficiently process sparse measurements in 3D space. To alleviate the lack of vertical supervision, we propose the Joint Spectrum Integrity Loss, which integrates volume-level pseudo-label supervision, map-level geometry-aware radio rendering, and pixel-level localized constraints within a unified optimization scheme. This design enables the model to capture complex vertical structural relationships more effectively under sparse supervision. Extensive experiments across several radio map datasets show that RadioFormer3D achieves superior overall performance compared to representative existing methods. In particular, it demonstrates improved reconstruction quality at unlabeled altitudes while maintaining a favorable trade-off between accuracy and inference efficiency, positioning it as a highly promising solution for future 3D environment-aware wireless networks.
Zheng Fang, Junjie Liu, Kangjun Liu +3
Pengcheng Laboratory, China · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China · Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China
Next-generation wireless systems such as 6G operate at higher frequency bands, making signal propagation highly sensitive to environmental factors such as buildings and vege- tation. Accurate Radio Environment Map (REM) estimation is therefore increasingly important for effective network planning and operation. Existing methods, from ray-tracing simulators to deep learning generative models, achieve promising results but require detailed 3D environment data such as LiDAR-derived point clouds, which are costly to acquire, several gigabytes per km2 in size, and quickly outdated in dynamic environments. We propose a two-stage framework that eliminates the need for 3D data at inference time: in the first stage, a learned estimator predicts elevation maps directly from satellite RGB imagery, which are then fed alongside antenna parameters into the REM estimator in the second stage. Across existing CNN- based REM estimation architectures, the proposed approach improves RMSE by up to 7.8% over image-only baselines, while operating on the same input feature space and requiring no 3D data during inference, offering a practical alternative for scalable radio environment modelling.
Radio maps describe how wireless signals propagate across space and are essential for wireless communication, sensing, and network planning. However, constructing accurate radio maps traditionally requires either dense measurements or computationally expensive physical simulations, which limits scalability and real-time deployment. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence offer a promising alternative, but existing approaches lack fine-grained control and physical consistency when applied to real-world wireless environments. Here we present ControlRadio, a controllable generative framework that produces radio maps from natural-language descriptions and environmental layouts, including building structures and transmitter locations. Joint semantic and spatial conditioning enables interpretable, propagation-plausible generation, while a controlled latent prior and layout-aware conditioning improve stability and structural consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ControlRadio achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and strong generalization across diverse urban scenarios, while reducing computation time by more than four orders of magnitude compared with conventional simulation-based methods. Such results suggest a new paradigm for scalable and controllable wireless environment modeling, with broad implications for next-generation communication systems and data-driven radio sensing.
Kangjun Liu, Xiying Pan, Shuhang Zhang +3
Pengcheng Laboratory, China · South China University of Technology and the Pengcheng Laboratory, China · Peking University, China +2