A study for development of propagation model based on ray tracing for coverage prediction in terrestrial broadcasting systems

In this work, improvements on propagation prediction models based on ray tracing in coverage estimation for digital broadcasting systems are presented. For this purpose, firstly, propagation models based on Geometrical Theory of Diffraction (GTD) are discussed, and then an improved model is proposed for prediction of propagation path loss or electric field strength at the receiver. The proposed model incorporates first order expansion of classical GTD in field computation and convex hull for ray tracing. Simulation results are presented for comparison of various models in terms of computation time and accuracy.