SparsePilot: Belief-Guided Network Planning under Sparse Wireless Measurements

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as a promising solution for on-demand wireless coverage planning in urban environments. Existing learning-based UAV control methods, however, typically rely on continuous access to dense user-level received signal strength (RSS) measurements. Such full-observation assumptions are difficult to satisfy in real-world deployments due to the high cost and limited availability of dense wireless feedback. Sparse-feedback decision making under severe observation constraints therefore represents a fundamental challenge. To fill this gap, we propose SparsePilot, a measurement-efficient sensing-control framework that couples active wireless probing with belief-guided network control. SparsePilot formulates spatial probing as a multi-armed bandit problem over grid cells, uses upper confidence bound probing to select informative regions, and aggregates sparse RSS measurements into a coverage belief map. A deep reinforcement learning controller then uses this belief state to generate continuous UAV mobility actions, while the full wireless state remains hidden from the policy. We further provide a theoretical analysis connecting sparse probing, belief estimation error, and the sparse-feedback performance gap. Experiments across seven urban digital twins show that SparsePilot achieves superior coverage restoration performance while using only about 3.1% of the full-observation measurement budget and demonstrates strong cross-scene generalization to unseen urban-scale wireless environments.