A high-speed 2.5D ray-tracing propagation model for microcellular systems, application: Smart cities

This paper introduces a new high-speed 2.5D deterministic radio propagation model. This model is suitable for outdoor urban configurations where transmitter and receiver nodes are below the rooftop level of the surrounding buildings. This model can provide narrow-band and wide-band predictions. In this paper we combine three acceleration strategies in order to achieve a high-speed site-specific urban microcellular model. The first strategy is an efficient implementation of a ray-tracing model based on the visibility tree technique. The second strategy is to consider only a limited portion of the propagation environment that has a significant contribution on the received signal estimation. The third strategy is based on a pre-calculation of the exact 2D visibility trees, in order to be used to reconstruct very quickly all the possible paths between a transmitter and a receiver. Simulation results for the implemented ray-tracing model with the first acceleration technique are presented and compared with measurements. Then, the other acceleration techniques were combined to further reduce the overall execution time to the minimum extent with a small impact on the accuracy.