A Monte-Carlo Based Numerical Integration Method for Diffraction Computation in Ray Tracing

The computation of diffraction has been always a challenge in ray tracing simulations. Despite the popularity of the ray based methods such as geometrical theory of diffraction (GTD) and uniform theory of diffraction (UTD), their computational complexity grows rapidly as the number of cascaded diffraction phenomena increases. Though an efficient physical optics (PO) based bidirectional method has been introduced as an alternative, it still relies on GTD/UTD for multiple diffractions. In this work, a novel Huygens’ principle based ray tracing method with an improved numerical integration technique is introduced. This method is expected to have lower computational cost and better numerical stability than GTD/UTD for multiple diffraction scenarios.