Spectrum cartography (SC), also known as radio map estimation (RME), aims at
crafting multi-domain (e.g., frequency and space) radio power propagation maps
from limited sensor measurements. While early methods often lacked theoretical
support, recent works have demonstrated that radio maps can be provably
recovered using low-dimensional models -- such as the block-term tensor
decomposition (BTD) model and certain deep generative models (DGMs) -- of the
high-dimensional multi-domain radio signals. However, these existing provable
SC approaches assume that sensors send real-valued (full-resolution)
measurements to the fusion center, which is unrealistic. This work puts forth a
quantized SC framework that generalizes the BTD and DGM-based SC to scenarios
where heavily quantized sensor measurements are used. A maximum likelihood
estimation (MLE)-based SC framework under a Gaussian quantizer is proposed.
Recoverability of the radio map using the MLE criterion are characterized under
realistic conditions, e.g., imperfect radio map modeling and noisy
measurements. Simulations and real-data experiments are used to showcase the
effectiveness of the proposed approach.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure