Implementation and Evaluation of Ray-Tracing Acceleration Methods in Wireless Communication

Accurate channel modeling is critical to support the design and deployment of wireless communication systems. Ray-tracing (RT) based deterministic channel modeling has been considered as a key candidate to generate accurate channels for specified scenarios. However, the efficiency of RT decreases as the complexity of the environment increases. This factor significantly limits the applicability of RT, thus the acceleration technologies are highly demanded. In this paper, two space partitioning methods, including the uniform grid and the k-dimensional (k-D) tree, are implemented to accelerate RT by changing the storage structure of the environment. The efficiencies of both methods are compared in different environments with different configurations. As expected, the efficiency of RT has been improved considerably after being accelerated, and the application scenarios for both acceleration methods are derived. Finally, by comparing with the measurement and simulation, it is found that the accuracy of RT is not influenced after being accelerated.