Radio-Tracer A Tool for Deterministic Simulation of Wave Propagation

Ray-tracing and UTD (Uniform Theory of Diffraction) techniques are already widely applied to site-specific radio propagation modeling for wireless applications. This paper briefly presents the software tool Radio-Tracer that uses efficient algorithms to calculate dynamically the exact visibility graph of an environment taking into account the position of both transmitter and receivers and the multi-path propagation model. A fast ray-tracing engine finally guarantees that all ray-paths with up to a desired number of interactions are found. Uniform theory of diffraction is applied once all ray-paths have been calculated to compute electromagnetical parameters such as power delay profiles or overall variations in order to characterize the wireless channel. The kernel of Radio-Tracer has been extended to deal with the special needs of a land mobile satellite environment where diffractions of horizontal edges become important and where the number of possible satellite positions and sample points on a mobile route become quite large.