A Full 3-D GPU-based Beam-Tracing Method for Complex Indoor Environments Propagation Modeling

Ray tracing method is a popular method for predicting radio channel properties in indoor environments. Due to the discrete sampling of the space, the ray tracing method is time-consuming in obtaining accurate results. In this paper, an accurate and efficient GPU-based kD-tree-accelerated beam-tracing method (GKBT), designed to run on GPU in parallel, is proposed, which overcomes the discrete sampling artifacts of ray tracing methods. The proposed method contains both an efficient beam-triangle intersection algorithm based on Pluecker coordinates and a kD-tree traversal algorithm extended to beam tracing to dramatically reduce the computation time. The simulated result shows great agreement with the measured result published in literature. Numerical experiments show that the GKBT is about ten times faster than the state-of-the-art ray tracing method. Finally, a simulated result for a realistic indoor environment is given, which shows that furniture has great influences on the ultrawide band (UWB) field distribution and channel performance.