An improved three-dimensional ray tracing model for mobile communications

This paper presents a novel three-dimensional propagation model for a general environment including building structures with non-planar or curved surfaces. A method to overcome the difficulty of modeling such scatterers with curved surfaces in ray tracing model is presented. The model takes into account all possible propagation paths from any combination of an arbitrary number of reflections, transmissions and diffractions from/through plane surfaces, straight edges as well as curved surfaces. Comparisons between our theoretical results and measured power delay profiles, rms delay spreads and path loss in a microcell containing building structures with curved surfaces show good agreement. Our results show that the inclusion of scattering from curved surfaces has a significant effect on the power delay profile and rms delay spread especially in the shadow regions