Radio Map Updating from Streaming Spectrum Measurements via Memory-Based Online Gaussian Processes

Abstract

Radio maps, which estimate spatial radio-frequency characteristics from spectrum measurements, are essential for applications such as spectrum management and network planning. With the continuous arrival of spectrum measurements, conventional batch processing methods for radio map reconstruction become computationally prohibitive, as they require reprocessing all accumulated measurements for each radio map update. To address this, we propose a memory-based online sparse variational Gaussian process (M-OSVGP) method that efficiently updates radio maps from streaming spectrum measurements. Our method employs sparse variational inference and updates the posterior online by minimizing a hybrid objective that integrates newly received measurements and a memory subset of previous ones to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. To further improve posterior approximation as measurements accumulate over spatially diverse regions, we extend M-OSVGP with a grid-assisted online inducing point selection (GOIPS) algorithm. GOIPS dynamically adapts the number and locations of inducing points based on measurement density and spatial correlation, providing a more informative inducing set while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods in reconstruction accuracy, computational efficiency, and uncertainty quantification, compared to existing batch and online baselines across various scenarios.