Fast Ray Tracing for Field Strength Prediction in Cellular Mobile Network Planning

In this paper we present a fast ray tracing technique with scalable appro ximation accuracy for eld strength prediction in cellular mobile network planning Automatic network design methods like the Adaptive Base Station Positioning Al gorithm ABPA perform a huge number of eld strength estimations and require therefore a fast and accurate approximation However common prediction techniques either give only rough estimations or are too complex for fast evaluation cf The proposed new ray tracing technique obtains its speed up by taking advan tage of the topological information inherent in the used triangulation data structure of the investigated terrain By that it is possible to apply simple mathematics and algorithms to trace individual rays The applicability of the fast ray tracing techni que is demonstrated for both a single transmitter scenario and in conjunction with ABPA