Ishaan S. Gupte | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

SPARC: Sparse Path-Aware Residual Calibrator for Wireless Ray Tracing at Upper Mid-Band

Accurate site-specific ray tracing (RT) is essential for upper mid-band network planning, yet raw RT can produce per-path multipath component (MPC) power errors on the order of 19--24~dB in cluttered indoor environments. A fixed-geometry material-sensitivity bound shows that a 30% relative-permittivity perturbation changes each surface interaction by at most 6.28~dB across the considered indoor materials. However, even MPCs with only one surface interaction exhibit a 19.2~dB mean RT--measurement bias, suggesting that missing clutter, displaced surfaces, and simplified 3D geometry dominate the per-path RT error. We propose SPARC (Sparse Path-Aware Residual Calibrator), a lightweight per-path calibration method that learns a sparse linear residual model from one completed RT simulation. SPARC uses standard RT features selected per fold by nested cross-validation, with ridge regularization and power-gated path matching; four features recur in both environments. Using measured indoor factory (InF) and indoor hotspot (InH) datasets at 6.75 and 16.95~GHz, SPARC reduces per-path power RMSE from 18.74 to 4.74~dB in InF and from 23.12 to 5.39~dB in InH. A jointly trained InF+InH model achieves 5.73~dB RMSE. When all links from one transmitter location are held out for testing, SPARC achieves 4.99~dB RMSE in InF and 5.85~dB RMSE in InH. SPARC therefore provides a practical post-processing calibration layer for site-specific per-path power prediction without ray-tracer modification or additional RT runs.

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arXiv2025

Standardized Machine-Readable Point-Data Format for Consolidating Wireless Propagation Across Environments, Frequencies, and Institutions

The necessity of new spectrum for 6G has intensified global interest in radio propagation measurements across emerging frequency bands, use cases, and antenna types. These measurements are vital for understanding radio channel properties in diverse environments, and involve time-consuming and expensive campaigns. A major challenge for the effective utilization of propagation measurement data has been the lack of a standardized format for reporting and archiving results. Although organizations such as NIST, NGA, and 3GPP have made commendable efforts for data pooling, a unified machine-readable data format for consolidating measurements across different institutions and frequencies remains a missing piece in advancing global standardization efforts. This paper introduces a standardized point-data format for radio propagation measurements and demonstrates how institutions may merge disparate campaigns into a common format. This data format, alongside an environmental map and a measurement summary metadata table, enables integration of data from disparate sources by using a structured representation of key parameters. Here, we show the efficacy of the point-data format standard using data gathered from two independent sub-THz urban microcell (UMi) campaigns: 142 GHz measurements at New York University (NYU) and 145 GHz measurements at the University of Southern California (USC). A joint path loss analysis using the close-in path loss model (1 m ref. distance) yields a refined estimate of the path loss exponent (PLE) employing the proposed standard to pool measurements. Other statistics such as RMS delay spread and angular spread are also determined using a joint point-data table. Adopting this simple, unified format will accelerate channel model development, build multi-institutional datasets, and feed AI/ML applications with reliable training data in a common format from many sources.

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