FDTD and Ray Optical Methods for Indoor Wave Propagation Modeling

Growing interest in providing and improving radio coverage for mobile phones and wireless LANs inside buildings has recently emerged. The need of such coverage appears mainly in office buildings, shopping malls in very complex environment. Although the three dimensional FDTD method has shown great promise, the calculation time is very environment dependent and exceeds the calculation time of ray tracing or ray launching in most cases. In this article, we focus on the theoretical estimation and comparison of FDTD and ray methods in aspects of the algorithmic complexity. We introduce measured and computed results for indoor environment to illustrate the time and memory requirement of 3D FDTD method. Finally detailed introduction of combination of Ray optical and FDTD methods is presented.