Geometry-based path interpolation for rapid ray-optical modeling of vehicular channels

Ray-optical algorithms are an excellent choice to model the radio channel in a deterministic manner. Especially, in vehicular environments where the channel is time-variant and system designers potentially need to consider the non-stationarity of the channel, ray-optical tools are a welcome solution to evaluate the achievable system performance in specific scenarios. The main drawback of ray-optical models is the high complexity resulting in time consuming simulations - especially when a high time resolution of the channel is required and the description of the considered scenario is complex. In this paper, an approach to reduce the utilization rate of ray-optical models is presented. An efficient geometry-based interpolation algorithm is employed to obtain information about the present propagation paths between two consecutive scenario snapshots. It is shown that the simulation runtime can be clearly reduced if the proposed algorithm is applied. Finally, the presented approach is validated against high-resolution results of a ray-optical channel model.