arXiv subjects

Raju Shrestha

Publications and source records attributed to Raju Shrestha.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Radio Map Estimation: Empirical Validation and Analysis

Radio maps provide metrics such as the received signal strength at every location in a geographical region of interest. Extensive research has been carried out in this context, but it relies almost exclusively on synthetic-data experiments. Thus, the practical aspects of the radio map estimation (RME) problem as well as the performance of existing estimators in the real world remain unknown. To fill this gap end, this paper puts forth the first comprehensive, rigorous, and reproducible study of RME with real data. The main contributions include (C1) an assessment of the viability of RME based on the estimation error that can be achieved, (C2) the analysis of the main phenomena and trade-offs involved in RME, including the experimental verification of theoretical findings in the literature, and (C3) a thorough evaluation of a wide range of estimators on realworld data. Remarkably, this reveals that the performance gain of existing deep estimators in their pure form may not compensate for their complexity. A simple enhancement (C4) is proposed to alleviate this issue. The vast amount of data collected for this study is published along with the developed simulator to enable research on new schemes, hopefully bringing RME one step closer to practical deployment.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Aerial Base Station Placement via Propagation Radio Maps

The deployment of aerial base stations (ABSs) on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) presents a promising solution for extending cellular connectivity to areas where terrestrial infrastructure is overloaded, damaged, or absent. A pivotal challenge in this domain is to decide the locations of a set of ABSs to effectively serve ground-based users. Most existing approaches oversimplify this problem by assuming that the channel gain between two points is a function of solely distance and, sometimes, also the elevation angle. In turn, this paper leverages propagation radio maps to account for arbitrary air-to-ground channel gains. This methodology enables the identification of an approximately minimal set of locations where ABSs need to be deployed to ensure that all ground terminals achieve a target service rate, while adhering to backhaul capacity limitations and avoiding designated no-fly zones. Relying on a convex relaxation technique and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), this paper puts forth a solver whose computational complexity scales linearly with the number of ground terminals. Convergence is established analytically and an extensive set of simulations corroborate the merits of the proposed scheme relative to conventional methods.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Theoretical Analysis of the Radio Map Estimation Problem

Radio maps provide radio frequency metrics, such as the received signal strength, at every location of a geographic area. These maps, which are estimated using a set of measurements collected at multiple positions, find a wide range of applications in wireless communications, including the prediction of coverage holes, network planning, resource allocation, and path planning for mobile robots. Although a vast number of estimators have been proposed, the theoretical understanding of the radio map estimation (RME) problem has not been addressed. The present work aims at filling this gap along two directions. First, the complexity of the set of radio map functions is quantified by means of lower and upper bounds on their spatial variability, which offers valuable insight into the required spatial distribution of measurements and the estimators that can be used. Second, the reconstruction error for power maps in free space is upper bounded for three conventional spatial interpolators. The proximity coefficient, which is a decreasing function of the distance from the transmitters to the mapped region, is proposed to quantify the complexity of the RME problem. Numerical experiments assess the tightness of the obtained bounds and the validity of the main takeaways in complex environments.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2022

Spectrum Surveying: Active Radio Map Estimation with Autonomous UAVs

Radio maps find numerous applications in wireless communications and mobile robotics tasks, including resource allocation, interference coordination, and mission planning. Although numerous techniques have been proposed to construct radio maps from spatially distributed measurements, the locations of such measurements are assumed predetermined beforehand. In contrast, this paper proposes spectrum surveying, where a mobile robot such as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collects measurements at a set of locations that are actively selected to obtain high-quality map estimates in a short surveying time. This is performed in two steps. First, two novel algorithms, a model-based online Bayesian estimator and a data-driven deep learning algorithm, are devised for updating a map estimate and an uncertainty metric that indicates the informativeness of measurements at each possible location. These algorithms offer complementary benefits and feature constant complexity per measurement. Second, the uncertainty metric is used to plan the trajectory of the UAV to gather measurements at the most informative locations. To overcome the combinatorial complexity of this problem, a dynamic programming approach is proposed to obtain lists of waypoints through areas of large uncertainty in linear time. Numerical experiments conducted on a realistic dataset confirm that the proposed scheme constructs accurate radio maps quickly.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Aerial Spectrum Surveying: Radio Map Estimation with Autonomous UAVs

Radio maps are emerging as a popular means to endow next-generation wireless communications with situational awareness. In particular, radio maps are expected to play a central role in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communications since they can be used to determine interference or channel gain at a spatial location where a UAV has not been before. Existing methods for radio map estimation utilize measurements collected by sensors whose locations cannot be controlled. In contrast, this paper proposes a scheme in which a UAV collects measurements along a trajectory. This trajectory is designed to obtain accurate estimates of the target radio map in a short time operation. The route planning algorithm relies on a map uncertainty metric to collect measurements at those locations where they are more informative. An online Bayesian learning algorithm is developed to update the map estimate and uncertainty metric every time a new measurement is collected, which enables real-time operation.

eess.SP↗