Fast computational techniques for indoor radio channel estimation

Driven by our increasingly mobile society's ever growing demand for communications, today's providers of wireless telecommunication services must ensure reliable radio coverage "everywhere". Computer based techniques that reduce the need for expensive experimental measurements are invaluable tools for achieving this objective. Various computational algorithms based mainly on ray tracing have emerged in recent years for determining radio coverage. Although the output of these algorithms agrees well with measurement results, execution times remain high. To provide faster computational methods for determining radio coverage, we have developed a fast 3D method of regions (MR) algorithm. This algorithm divides the environment into reflection, transmission, and possibly diffraction regions, then identifies infeasible image combinations and locations affected by similar propagation mechanisms a priori. When implemented on a parallel machine, our algorithm provides close-to-ideal speedups, enabling the fast computation of radio coverage that service providers require.