A ray tracing approach to predicting indoor field distributions

The last decade has seen an unprecedented growth in the use of mobile radio services both in the UK and overseas. This development has been aided by much research interest in the field of mobile telephony. The radio environment is unfortunately a complex and somewhat hostile one for application of broadband systems. The received signal typically arrives via many separate paths arising from reflections, diffraction, and scattering within the surrounding media. The area of mobile radio propagation modelling has been actively researched, providing many useful methods. This work can be broadly divided into two categories-simulation and predictive models. The simulation model initially assumes that there are measured data obtained from the environment. An attempt is then made to find a mathematical model which agrees with the measured data. This approach is very useful but it does have limitations. The model cannot easily be changed for different environments and involves further measurements. In this paper a ray tracing algorithm for the prediction of propagation characteristics in cordless applications is presented. It is suitable for the prediction of narrow-band indoor field distribution.