Overview of the First Pathloss Radio Map Prediction Challenge

Pathloss quantifies the reduction in power density of a signal radiated from a transmitter. The attenuation is due to large-scale effects such as free-space propagation loss and interactions (e.g., penetration, reflection, and diffraction) of the signal with objects such as buildings, vehicles, trees, and pedestrians in the propagation environment. Many current or planned wireless communications applications require the knowledge (or a reliable approximation) of the pathloss on a dense grid (radio map) of the environment of interest. Deterministic simulation methods such as ray tracing are known to provide very good estimates of pathloss values. However, their high computational complexity makes them unsuitable for most of the applications envisaged. To promote research and facilitate a fair comparison among the recently proposed fast and accurate deep learning-based pathloss radio map prediction methods, we have organized the ICASSP 2023 First Pathloss Radio Map Prediction Challenge. In this overview paper, we describe the pathloss radio map prediction problem, provide a literature survey of the current state of the art, describe the challenge datasets, the challenge task, and the challenge evaluation methodology. Finally, we provide a brief overview of the submitted methods and present the results of the challenge.