Ray-tracing in a Virtual Drive for mobile communications

The availability of mobile communications from and to vehicles is becoming a major criterion for the market success of future cars. Presently the required antenna installations are tested by road driving, a time and money consuming adventure. This paper proposes a virtual drive, by which not only the test but also an optimization of the car-integrated antenna systems can be performed. This is achieved by electromagnetically modeling the complete scene, i.e. driving the electromagnetically modeled antennas on the car through a coverage predicted by ray-tracing. The obtained results are the complex output voltages at the different antennas, which allow for evaluating the antenna system suitability for communications applications with diversity and MIMO techniques.