WiFi-Diffusion: Achieving Fine-Grained WiFi Radio Map Estimation with Ultra-Low Sampling Rate by Diffusion Models

The radio map presents communication parameters of interest, e.g., received signal strength, at every point across a geographical region. It can be leveraged to improve the efficiency of spectrum utilization in the region, particularly critical for unlicensed WiFi spectrum. The problem of fine-grained radio map estimation is to utilize radio samples collected by sensors sparsely distributed in the region to infer a high-resolution radio map. This problem is challenging due to the ultra-low sampling rate, i.e., because the number of available samples is far fewer than the high resolution required for radio map estimation. We propose WiFi-Diffusion – a novel generative framework for achieving fine-grained WiFi radio map estimation using diffusion models. WiFi-Diffusion employs the creative power of generative AI to address the ultra-low sampling rate challenge and consists of three blocks: 1) a boost block, using prior information such as the layout of obstacles to optimize the diffusion model; 2) a generation block, leveraging the diffusion model to generate a candidate set of fine-grained radio maps; and 3) an election block, utilizing the radio propagation model as a guide to find the best fine-grained radio map from the candidate set. Extensive simulations demonstrate that 1) the fine-grained radio map generated by WiFi-Diffusion is ten times better than those produced by state-of-the-art (SOTA) when they use the same ultra-low sampling rate; and 2) WiFi-Diffusion achieves comparable fine-grained radio map quality with only one-fifth of the sampling rate required by SOTA.