Simplifying Building Structures for Efficient Radio Propagation Modeling

Accurate three-dimensional models for building structures play a key role in radio propagation modeling using ray tracing method in city environments. As the frequency of wireless systems increases to centimeter/millimeter bands and the application of narrow beam signals, more accurate models containing higher level-of-detail structural information are needed. Currently, digital databases represent such building structures in a manner that may be not suitable for efficient propagation modeling. One issue is the fragmentation of structures that unnecessarily increases the size of the model and reduces the computational efficiency. It also results in ray double counting problems that reduces the simulation accuracy. We propose practical methods to tackle the fragmentation to create models with much smaller sizes. We also propose strategies to treat small structures to further reduce the sizes of environmental models without affect the simulation accuracy significantly.