An Efficient Ray Tracing Algorithm for Multiple Straight Wedge Diffraction

Abstract

We present an efficient algorithm for the tracing of multiply edge diffracted rays. The algorithm assumes a given sequence of infinite edges and complete visibility among them. The ray tracing problem is formulated as the minimization of the ray total path length. Since such a cost function is strictly convex, except for coplanar edges in the plane-wave far-field regime, then the problem admits a unique global minimum and allows the use of a modified Newton search algorithm, which exhibits a very high converging rate. We also propose a convenient starting point to effectively initialize the minimization algorithm. The proposed algorithm is tested by some numerical examples that show its efficiency and effectiveness.