Improved High-Order FDTD Parallel Propagator for Realistic Urban Scenarios and Atmospheric Conditions

This letter introduces an improved finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) propagator for radiowave prediction in complex urban environments. The original method was based on an unconditionally stable scheme with a high-order formulation and material-independent perfectly matched layers in a moving window algorithm (US-HO-MI-MW-FDTD). In the present work, the regularization technique is applied to treat material discontinuities and consequently to improve the accuracy of the high-order formulation. This permits the inclusion of urban buildings on the FDTD analysis. Moreover, the original algorithm is parallelized with the OpenMP library to achieve high computation performance and use finer FDTD meshes. The new propagator is validated through cases involving atmospheric refraction. Finally, we present and analyze a cellular system measurement campaign.