Geometric heuristics for rural radio maps approximation

Given a terrain T and an antenna A located on it, we would like to approximate the Radio Map of A over T, namely, to associate a signal strength for each point p∈T as received from A. This work presents a new Radio Map approximation algorithm using an adaptive radial sweep-line technique. The suggested radar-like algorithm (RLA) uses a pipe-line method for computing the signal strength along points on a ray, and an adaptive method for interpolating the signal strength over regions between two consecutive rays. Whenever the difference between two consecutive rays is above a certain threshold, a middle ray is created. Thus, the density of the sampling rays is sensitive to the shape of the terrain. Finally, we report on an experiment which compares the new algorithm with other well-known methods. The main conclusion is that the new RLA is significantly faster than the others, i.e., its running time is 3–15 times faster for the same approximation accuracy.