Building Hardware Accelerators for Environmental Awareness Using Ray-Tracing

Ray-tracing technique brings new solutions for robust beam management in 6G wireless communication. In this paper, a new reflection path derivation algorithm for ray-tracing of beams, i.e., iterative path convergence algorithm (IPC), is proposed. By decomposing the derivation of the entire ray path into mutually independent sub-problems associated with the respective planes involved in the reflection, the parallelization of the entire ray-tracing is realized, which significantly improves the convergence speed of the simulation; in addition, this paper also designs a module architecture that enables the IPC algorithm to be implemented on FPGAs, which fully utilizes the reconfigurability and parallelism of FPGAs to accelerate the convergence of the ray-tracing simulation. Finally, it has been validated that real-time ray-tracing can be achieved in milliseconds by the proposed FPGA-based IPC algorithm for a given pre-processed dynamic environment.