Database simplification for field prediction in urban environment [radiowave propagation]

The performance and the usability of deterministic field prediction tools for the urban environment is heavily limited by the high computing time, which depends exponentially on the size of the input urban database. A simple technique for urban database simplification, aimed at speeding up deterministic field prediction is presented in the paper. Such a technique, based on a sort of heuristic preprocessing of the city map, identifies the buildings which are ´likely´ to have an impact on the multipath propagation mechanism taking place between the radio terminals, and discards the rest of the map. Using this pre-processing technique, the CPU time can be decreased by orders of magnitude in typical ray tracing prediction cases, while the accuracy of the results only marginally degrades, as shown in the results section of the paper.