A hybrid technique based on combining ray tracing and FDTD methods for site-specific modeling of indoor radio wave propagation

Abstract

The paper presents a hybrid technique based on combining ray tracing and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) methods for site-specific modeling of indoor radio wave propagation. Ray tracing is used to analyze the wide area and FDTD is used to study areas close to complex discontinuities where ray-based solutions are not sufficiently accurate. The hybrid technique ensures improved accuracy and practicality in terms of computational resources at the same time since FDTD is only applied to a small portion of the entire modeling environment. Examples of applying the method for studying indoor structures and penetration of wave from outdoor to indoor are given at 2.4 GHz. Numerical results are compared with known exact solutions or results of the full wave analysis or traditional ray model to demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of the novel method. Numerical results are also compared with reported measurement results for waves at 1.29 GHz penetrating an external wall with metal-framed windows. Cumulative distributions of field envelope obtained from the hybrid method show close resemblance to the Rayleigh distribution, which conforms to the reported measurement results.