Novel ray-tracing acceleration technique employing genetic algorithm for radio propagation prediction

The ray-tracing method is very attractive because several radio propagation characteristics can be simply predicted based on the knowledge of the rays geometrically traced from the transmitter to the receiver. However, when taking many structures into consideration, many rays must be traced in order to achieve a high level of prediction accuracy, and this is very time consuming. Accelerating the ray-tracing process while maintaining a high level of prediction accuracy is an important problem that needs to be addressed. This paper proposes a ray-tracing acceleration technique employing the Genetic algorithm called the GA_RT method. The performance is evaluated based on computer simulation and the results show that the number of calculations can be reduced to approximately 20% if 4 dB is within the allowable calculation error. Moreover, when there are many calculation points in a wide area, application of the Chain model is proposed in conjunction with the GA_RT method. By using this combination, the computation time is minimized to approximately 6% with the calculation error of approximately 1 dB.