RF-3DGS: Wireless Channel Modeling with Radio Radiance Field and 3D Gaussian Splatting

Precisely modeling radio propagation in complex environments has been a significant challenge, especially with the advent of 5G and beyond networks, where managing massive antenna arrays demands more detailed information. Traditional methods, such as empirical models and ray tracing, often fall short, either due to insufficient details or because of challenges for real-time applications. Inspired by the newly proposed 3D Gaussian Splatting method in the computer vision domain, which outperforms other methods in reconstructing optical radiance fields, we propose RF-3DGS, a novel approach that enables precise site-specific reconstruction of radio radiance fields from sparse samples. RF-3DGS can render radio spatial spectra at arbitrary positions within 2 ms following a brief 3-minute training period, effectively identifying dominant propagation paths. Furthermore, RF-3DGS can provide fine-grained Spatial Channel State Information (Spatial-CSI) of these paths, including the channel gain, the delay, the angle of arrival (AoA), and the angle of departure (AoD). Our experiments, calibrated through real-world measurements, demonstrate that RF-3DGS not only significantly improves reconstruction quality, training efficiency, and rendering speed compared to state-of-the-art methods, but also holds great potential for supporting wireless communication and advanced applications such as Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC). Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/SunLab-UGA/RF-3DGS.
Comment: in submission to IEEE journals