Recent improvements in beam tracing

Ray tracing methods together with geometrical optics (GO) and uniform theory of diffraction (UTD) are usually exploited to model electromagnetic field propagation in complex environments, such as urban and indoor scenarios. Ray-optics models calculate the total field impinging on a receiver as ray field superposition. In particular, 3D ray-tracers require high-resolution, site-specific information, which hugely increase the computational cost. The overall accuracy depends on. the amount of detail in the scene that a ray tracer is able to handle, as well as on the algorithms in use for ray tracing, several of which have been proposed. The paper discusses some recently proposed ray tracing techniques.