A ray-tracing method based on the triangular grid approach and application to propagation prediction in urban environments

This paper presents a fast ray-tracing procedure based on triangular division of the propagation environments. Unlike other accelerating methods that are mostly based on pre-establishment of visibility, this method does not require knowledge of the position information of the base station and/or receiving antennas and is thus more general. Although the triangulation is done in a two-dimensional (2-D) plane, this method is suitable for three-dimensional (3-D) simulations when a proper data structure for buildings is constructed. Validation results show good agreement between calculated and measured data from the European COST 231 project. The improvement in the computational efficiency is clearly demonstrated in examples.