Sample-and-Score: Surrogate-Guided Coordinated Spatial Reuse in IEEE 802.11 Networks

Wi-Fi networks are moving beyond random channel access toward tightly coordinated operation across access points (APs), a shift reflected in Wi-Fi 8's multi-AP coordination (MAPC). However, the current MAPC specification restricts cooperation to AP pairs, fundamentally limiting the gains achievable in dense deployments and calling for scalable, network-wide coordination in beyond Wi-Fi 8 systems. We target coordinated spatial reuse (Co-SR), where APs transmit concurrently at reduced power. Effective Co-SR demands joint selection and configuration of AP-station transmissions, yet existing approaches simply do not scale: they rely on heavy signaling, slow convergence, unrealistic assumptions, and often require computation time that explodes with network size. We introduce FM4WiFi, a generative ML pipeline that addresses these limitations by producing high-quality Co-SR configurations in a single inference step. FM4WiFi integrates (i) an autoencoder that learns compact latent representations of network states, (ii) a flow-matching generative model that synthesizes feasible Co-SR configurations (including rate control, absent from prior work), and (iii) a surrogate rate predictor that allows rapid, large-scale Co-SR candidate evaluation without dependence on a live system or digital twin. Across extensive evaluations (including experimental validation), FM4WiFi matches or exceeds state-of-the-art baselines at medium-to-large scales and scales to 30+ APs with sub-second inference. Extensive ablation studies validate each modeling and optimization choice.

Automating city-scale wireless deployment remains challenging under complex urban propagation and network-wide interference. We introduce CityDeploy-Bench, a benchmark that reframes multi-transmitter deployment as physics-grounded spatial set planning under a unified ray-tracing verifier. The benchmark separates utility representation from planning dynamics, enabling controlled comparison between direct scalar rewards, relational models, and higher-order interaction structures across diverse planners. Our experiments reveal a clear transition in planning behavior as physical coupling grows. Deployment quality becomes increasingly dependent on whether the learned utility captures collective transmitter interactions, whereas stronger search alone cannot compensate for missing relational structure. This establishes multi-transmitter deployment as a coordination problem over physically interacting sets rather than a collection of independent spatial decisions. We release CityDeploy-Data and the benchmark framework as a reproducible testbed for research linking decision learning with physically grounded wireless network design.

Optimal wireless transmitter placement is a central task in radio-network planning, and exhaustive search becomes prohibitively expensive at scale. This paper studies the single-transmitter setting under a learned propagation model, enabling exhaustive per-pixel assessment at scale in a regime where measurement-based labeling is infeasible and ray-tracing-based labeling is computationally out of reach. We introduce a dataset of 167525 urban scenarios (RadioMapSeer-Deployment) with dual ground-truth labels for coverage-optimal and power-optimal transmitter locations. Benchmark analysis reveals an asymmetric coverage-power trade-off: coverage-optimal placement sacrifices 13.86% of received-power, whereas power-optimal placement sacrifices 5.50% of coverage; the best balanced placement lies at $\bar{d}=2.60$ from the ideal point (100%,100%). We evaluate two learning formulations: indirect heatmap-based models predicting received-power radio maps, and direct score-map models predicting the objective landscape over feasible transmitter locations. Within the heatmap family, discriminative models deliver one-shot predictions 1350-2400$\times$ faster than exhaustive search, while diffusion models additionally support multi-sample inference that improves single-objective performance and, by reusing the same sample pool under a balanced criterion, recovers strong balanced placements without explicit multi-objective training. Dual score-map strategies combining power and coverage score-maps match the exhaustive balanced optimum ($\bar{d}=2.60$) and remain close to it across smaller candidate budgets, at 14-22$\times$ speedups including the cost of evaluating shortlisted candidates. Dual score-map methods are strongest overall, whereas heatmap formulations remain attractive for their physically meaningful intermediate maps and, in the diffusion setting, for inference-time search.