ProSpire: Proactive Spatial Prediction of Radio Environment Using Deep Learning

Spatial prediction of the radio propagation environment (henceforth 'radio environment' for brevity) of a transmitter can assist and improve various aspects of wireless networks. The majority of research in this domain can be categorized as 're-active' spatial prediction, where the predictions are made based on a small set of measurements from an active transmitter whose radio environment is to be predicted. Emerging spectrum-sharing paradigms would benefit from 'proactive' spatial prediction of the radio environment, where the spatial predictions must be done for a transmitter for which no measurement has been collected. This paper proposes a novel, supervised deep learning-based framework, ProSpire, that enables spectrum sharing by leveraging the idea of proactive spatial prediction. We carefully address several challenges in ProSpire, such as designing a framework that conveniently collects training data for learning, performing the predictions in a fast manner, enabling operations without an area map, and ensuring that the predictions do not lead to undesired interference. ProSpire relies on the crowdsourcing of transmitters and receivers during their normal operations to address some of the aforementioned challenges. The core component of ProSpire is a deep learning-based image-to-image translation method, which we call RSSu-net. We generate several diverse datasets using ray tracing software and numerically evaluate ProSpire. Our evaluations show that RSSu-net performs reasonably well in terms of signal strength prediction, approximate to 5 dB mean absolute error, which is comparable to the average error of other relevant methods. Importantly, due to the merits of RSSunet, ProSpire creates proactive boundaries around transmitters such that they can be activated with approximate to 97% probability of not causing interference. In this regard, the performance of RSSu-net is 19% better than that of other comparable methods.