A Fast 3-D Deterministic Ray Tracing Coverage Simulator Including Creeping Rays Based On Geometry Voxelization Technique

Abstract

A deterministic ray tracing simulator is described in this work which conveniently fulfills the requirements of a radar coverage, i.e., field distribution, simulator at 24 GHz or above. Very high performance is achieved by avoiding computational loops due to the usage of same-size matrices. The considered geometry is defined by a voxelization technique to improve the flexibility of this family of ray tracers. A reliable root finder which locates all roots of an equation simultaneously is used to efficiently find the intersections of the rays and the objects based on analytical geometry representations. Also, illumination matrices identify the contributing rays for all the observation points and simplify the process of field superposition. Creeping rays are included into the simulator for more accurate transitions from the illuminated to the deep shadow regions. Furthermore, the proposed simulator is capable of carrying out large bandwidth tasks such as channel impulse response computations. The results approve the capability of the simulator to be used as an optimization and design tool for complex and electrically large scenarios of a radar system including moving targets.