Analysis of wireless propagation using a novel 3D Raytracing acceleration technique

Abstract

The  rapid  growth  in  wireless  communications  has  led  to  the  need  for  an  effective  way  to  evaluate  the  radio  propagation. Dense urban areas and indoor spaces tend to be complex environments that require a lot of obstacles to be modeled. In such environments, the radio propagation is an extremely complex phenomenon and ray tracing techniques have been widely used to analyze these problems. However, the main drawback of ray tracing algorithm is it slowness. Therefore, the ray tracing process should be performed using techniques that improve the efficiency of the computations. This paper presents a new ray tracing acceleration technique that combines AZB and octree techniques to subdivide the space. This new technique was validated by propagation measurements in two hospital environments  and  the  maximum  error  encountered  for  measured  and  calculated  values  was  below  8%.  The  new  technique reduces the computation time by half in comparison to AZB technique. But, as the number of interactions increases, computational time increases as well.