An Accurate and Efficient 3-D Shooting-and- Bouncing-Polygon Ray Tracer for Radio Propagation Modeling

This paper describes two important improvements to a 3-D shooting-and-bouncing-polygon (SBP) ray tracer for radio propagation modeling. It introduces a way to trace diffracted-reflected (D-R) rays in the SBP framework and improves SBP accuracy when the D-R rays play an important role. It also introduces a better space partitioning scheme for the use with SBP and improves the SBP's computation efficiency by more than 10× in some applications. The numerical results are compared against published measurements and 3-D full-wave solutions. They show that the improved SBP ray tracer is a good multipurpose 3-D ray tracer which can be used to simulate urban street canyon (without double over-rooftop diffraction), indoor, and tunnel propagation environments.