GSpaRC: Gaussian Splatting for Real-time Reconstruction of RF Channels
About
Channel state information (CSI) is essential for adaptive beamforming and maintaining robust links in wireless communication systems. However, acquiring CSI incurs significant overhead, consuming up to 25% of spectrum resources in 5G networks due to frequent pilot transmissions at millisecond-scale intervals. Recent approaches aim to reduce this burden by reconstructing CSI from spatiotemporal RF measurements, such as signal strength and direction-of-arrival. While effective in offline settings, these methods often suffer from inference latencies in the 5-100 ms range, making them impractical for real-time systems. We present GSpaRC: Gaussian Splatting for Real-time Reconstruction of RF Channels, a method that achieves accurate channel reconstruction with latency in the low-millisecond regime or below. GSpaRC represents the RF environment using a compact set of 3D Gaussian primitives, each parameterized by a lightweight neural model augmented with physics-informed features such as distance-based attenuation. Unlike traditional vision-based splatting pipelines, GSpaRC is tailored for RF reception: it employs an equirectangular projection onto a hemispherical surface centered at the receiver to reflect omnidirectional antenna behavior. A custom CUDA pipeline enables fully parallelized directional sorting, splatting, and rendering across frequency and spatial dimensions. Evaluated on multiple RF datasets, GSpaRC achieves similar CSI reconstruction fidelity to recent state-of-the-art methods while reducing training and inference time by over an order of magnitude. These results illustrate that modest GPU computation can substantially reduce pilot overhead, making GSpaRC a scalable low-latency approach for channel estimation in 5G and future wireless systems.