Point Cloud for Wireless Communications: A Comprehensive Survey on Fundamentals, Techniques, and Applications

Abstract

Point cloud has recently emerged as a promising technology for next-generation wireless communication systems, offering precise geometric representations of complex environments. Despite growing interest, a comprehensive survey on its integration with wireless communications remains lacking. To bridge this gap, this survey provides a thorough review of state-of-the-art methods and applications of the point cloud across various wireless communication tasks over the last six years. We first introduce the fundamentals of point cloud for wireless communications, including acquisition techniques, preprocessing and representation methods, as well as open datasets and simulation tools. Subsequently, we investigate how point cloud effectively enhances key wireless communication tasks such as propagation channel modeling, blockage management, beam management, and proactive handoff. Additionally, emerging applications are extensively reviewed, including point cloud-enabled semantic wireless communications, wireless localization, metasurface coverage optimization, and digital-twin systems. Alongside these opportunities, we identify key challenges such as real-time processing of large-scale point clouds, robustness to environmental variations, multimodal fusion and calibration, generalization across diverse scenarios, the extension from single-user to multi-user wireless settings, the need for standardized benchmarking and open datasets, and associated privacy and security risks. We also outline promising research directions to guide the development of point cloud–enabled wireless networks.