Course Project Proposal

COMP 770 - Ben Newton

Goal:

Implement a system which can simulate the propagation of radio waves in an outdoor urban environment and output the expected signal strength at arbitrary points in the scene.

Prior State of the Art:

State of the art systems include:

Photon Path Map - Schmitz & Kobbelt - Aachen, Germany
2.5D Beam Tracing - Schmitz, et al. - Aachen, Germany
Dominant Path Prediction - Wahl, et al. - AWE Communications - Stuttgart, Germany
Edge Diffraction Based - Rick & Mathar - Aachen, Germany

State of the art Accuracy (predicted path loss compared to measured path loss values) : 4 to 8 dB
State of the art Speed (quad-core 2.6 GHz): 2 to 16 seconds
State of the art Scene Size: 79,000 to 255,000 triangles.

Motivation:

The GAMMA group is interested in applying what they have learned improving the state of the art for sound propagation to the RF domain. This is one of the first steps in that direction, to get a basic system up and running. I will also be working on a related 991 project for which I will research ways to improve the system, and advance the state of the art for RF propagation. I have some limited RF experience, and know that tools like this could be very useful if they worked well. I believe that the applications of RF propagation are even more numerous than that of sound propagation.

Libraries,etc:

I plan to make use of the RESound code, and adapt it for use in propagating Radio Waves.

Plan:

I plan to create a system which can predict radio wave propagation nearly as well as the state of the art systems. With my 991 work I will research and test improvements which I hope will make the system perform better than the state of the art systems.