New computationally efficient 2.5D and 3D ray tracing algorithms for modeling propagation environments

This paper presents the development of 2.5D and 3D extensions of a 2D procedure that is described in an earlier paper (see Zhang, Z. et al., Electronics Letters, vol.36, no.5, p.464-5, 2000) for modeling propagation environments. These methods are based on dividing the propagation region into cells whereby the number of cells is decided by the number of vertices of structures instead of their dimensions. Results from the 2.5D and 3D methods show significant improvement in computational efficiency. Specifically, the CPU time for the 2.5D method is less than 5% of that of the visibility ray tracing method. Accuracy, on the other hand, is related to that of a traditional ray tracing method and includes accounting for reflected, transmitted and diffracted rays.