Intelligent ray tracing-a new approach for field strength prediction in microcells

With micro- and even picocells becoming an ever more important part of modern network design, deterministic wave propagation modeling has become a widely discussed solution. The necessity of acquiring high resolution-high quality data as well as extensive computation time pose severe challenges to practical planning scenarios however. A number of solutions and accelerating techniques are known in literature, all of them performing quite well under certain preconditions, but are unsatisfactory when conditions change. Therefore, the basic principles of accelerating rigorous 3-D ray tracing are presented under the aspect of their impact on prediction accuracy. A software has been developed which is able to make 'intelligent' decisions with regard to the application of various accelerating algorithms and by consequence gives optimized performance in all types of propagation scenarios. Comparison with measurements shows the gain in computation efficiency as well as the achieved prediction accuracy.