Using Cray T3E for the parallel calculation of cellular radio coverage

A ray tracing based cellular coverage simulator has been parallelized in order to speed up excecution. The simulator has been developed for accurate prediction of radio wave propagation in urban microcells. It combines a vertical plane model simulating the wave propagation over the buildings and a horizontal plane model simulating the wave propagation in the street canyons between the buildings. The horizontal plane calculation is made by ray tracing using multiple diffractions around the corners of building. The parallel version has been implemented for a distributed memory machine, CRAY T3E. Parallelization of the vertical and horizontal plane calculations reduces the execution times considerably. Results indicate that only a small number of processors are required for efficient parallel execution. The load balancing algorithm has an important role in obtaining good speedups.