HLS-Based Approach for Embedded Real-Time Ray Tracing in Wireless Communications

Abstract

With the development of wireless communication technology, complex and dynamic scenarios pose great challenges to the Quality of Service (QoS) of wireless communication, especially in indoor scenarios. The quality of beam management can be greatly improved if signal ray-tracing module is embedded in wireless devices to handle synthetic multipath transmissions in real time. In this article, a novel reflection path derivation algorithm for ray tracing of signal beams is proposed, which builds the core mechanism of the proposed FPGA accelerator for ray tracing: by decomposing the computation of the entire ray path into mutually independent subproblems associated with the respective planes involved in the reflection and implemented by independent processing element on FPGAs, the parallelization of the entire ray tracing is realized, which significantly improves the convergence speed of the ray tracing; meanwhile, a new high-level synthesis workflow corresponds to the proposed algorithm and hardware architecture is proposed, which opens the door on synthesizing embedded hardware dedicated for robust and real-time wireless communication. After validation, the method proposed in this article can generate FPGA accelerator for real-time ray-tracing effectively, which achieves ray-tracing simulation in milliseconds.