3D Ray-tracing Analysis of Radio Propagation on Mars Surface

Recently, the literature has proposed some solutions to manage wireless connectivity on the Martian surface. This comes from the growing attention towards the exploration of the “Red Planet”, that will hopefully lead, in the next decades, to the landing of a human crew. As understandable, to design and assess viable solutions for future Martian mobile networking, there is urgent need of a realistic, Martian channel analysis, statistically representing large-scale and small-scale propagation phenomena. However, very few state-of-the-art contributions exhaustively deal with such a critical topic. Our paper aims at proposing a ray tracing-based analysis of multipath propagation occurring over the Martian surface. Thanks to high resolution Martian Digital Elevation Models (DEMs), a 3D structure of a Martian propagation region has been rendered and modelled by considering each pixel as a tile. The tile vertices are connected to the nearest ones, so to construct the walls of the 3D Martian location. Then, the ray tracing algorithm has been developed to simulate the 1
^st
and 2
^nd
reflections of an EM signal emitted by an isotropic antenna over the 3D Martian structure. The final outcome of the analysis will consist of a statistical, parametric, channel model, whose validity has been assessed in different frequency bands, namely: 2.5 GHz and 39 GHz. Different Martian terrains, characterized by different morphology, will be considered in our simulations to evaluate the variety of propagation conditions.