An Improved Shooting and Bouncing Ray Method for Outdoor Wave Propagation Prediction

An improved algorithm for shooting and bouncing ray tracing (SBR) is proposed in this paper. The conventional SBR method has to launch a large number of rays or ray tubes to guarantee the accuracy, which increases the calculation time significantly. This paper presents a novel adaptive ray launching (ARL) method based on the pattern of transmitting antenna, which reduces the launched rays greatly while maintaining the computation accuracy. Some examples of applying the proposed method to calculate the outdoor radio wave propagation are presented, and the results are compared with the measurements and simulations. The good agreements between them validate the proposed approach. The method has a high gain in terms of computational efficiency (about 480% speedup compared with 10 uniform ray launching).