Construction and Dynamic Update of Channel Gain Maps via 3D Gaussian Splatting

Abstract

Channel knowledge maps (CKMs) have emerged as a promising technique for providing scene-specific and location-dependent propagation knowledge to enable environment-aware wireless network design. This paper investigates the construction and dynamic updating of a particular type of CKM, namely grid-based channel gain maps (CGMs), for large-scale networks using three-dimensional Gaussian splatting (3DGS). First, we formulate a grid-based channel gain model, where each map entry is defined as the locally averaged channel gain over a receiver grid, thereby suppressing phase-sensitive small-scale fluctuations. The resulting channel gain is decomposed into distance-dependent attenuation, path transmittance, and effective scattering contributions. Based on this decomposition, we develop a physics-informed Gaussian-splatting-based channel gain (GS-CG) model, which represents the propagation environment as a set of Gaussian primitives. The proposed model maps Gaussian geometry, opacity, and directional features to propagation-related factors and renders grid-level channel gains through a differentiable process. To accommodate real-time environmental changes, we further propose an incremental learning mechanism that updates a static reference GS-CG representation into a dynamic CGM. Specifically, the reference Gaussian primitives are frozen, while a compact set of tunable Gaussians is introduced to capture newly induced local channel-gain variations from sparse measurements.Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed GS-CG methods accurately reconstruct grid-based CGMs, efficiently adapt to dynamic environmental changes, and achieve a favorable accuracy-complexity tradeoff for fast CGM refinement.