Data-Driven Radio Propagation Modeling using Graph Neural Networks
To address the low accuracy and high computational cost of radio signal propagation modeling in real-world scenarios, this paper proposes a data-driven coverage map generation method based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The approach automatically constructs a heterogeneous graph from environmental imagery, jointly encoding spatial topology and ray-based propagation relationships, and learns propagation patterns end-to-end using sparse, real-world signal measurements as supervision. This work is the first to apply GNNs to empirical radio propagation modeling, eliminating reliance on traditional physics-based solvers. Experiments demonstrate that the method surpasses classical numerical solvers (e.g., FDTD) and heuristic models in coverage map reconstruction accuracy, achieves 10–100× faster inference, and exhibits strong generalization—enabling high-fidelity signal coverage prediction from only a few measurements. These advances significantly enhance the efficiency and practicality of wireless network deployment.