Ship-to-ship beyond line-of-sight communications: A comparison between ray tracing simulations and the PETOOL

A Matlab-based ray tracing (RT) simulator is implemented for the analysis of ship-to-ship communications. The anomalous propagation effect due to the evaporation duct which results in bending and/or trapping the rays is modelled. Based on extensive RT simulations, the received rays are identified and their parameters are estimated. We briefly describe the implementation of the RT simulator and compare the obtained ray tracing results with those obtained from a widely used simulation tool, the PETOOL. We highlight the excellent agreement between the two tools for line-of-sight (LOS) ranges and also highlight that there is significant disagreements between them for beyond-line-of-sight (beyond-LOS) ranges. Then, based on our RT simulator, we provide detailed results describing the effect of the evaporation duct phenomena on the communication link quality in the beyond-LOS zone.