3D Dynamic Radio Map Prediction Using Vision Transformers for Low-Altitude Wireless Networks

Abstract

Low-altitude wireless networks (LAWN) are rapidly expanding with the growing deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for logistics, surveillance, and emergency response. Reliable connectivity remains a critical yet challenging task due to three-dimensional (3D) mobility, time-varying user density, and limited power budgets. The transmit power of base stations (BSs) fluctuates dynamically according to user locations and traffic demands, leading to a highly non-stationary 3D radio environment. Radio maps (RMs) have emerged as an effective means to characterize spatial power distributions and support radio-aware network optimization. However, most existing works construct static or offline RMs, overlooking real-time power variations and spatio-temporal dependencies in multi-UAV networks. To overcome this limitation, we propose a 3D dynamic radio map (3D-DRM) framework that learns and predicts the spatio-temporal evolution of received power. Specially, a Vision Transformer (ViT) encoder extracts high-dimensional spatial representations from 3D RMs, while a Transformer-based module models sequential dependencies to predict future power distributions. Experiments unveil that 3D-DRM accurately captures fast-varying power dynamics and substantially outperforms baseline models in both RM reconstruction and short-term prediction.