Wireless Channel Simulation Platform for Industrial Environments Based on 3D Ray Tracing

Abstract

With the development of 5G network and the ar-rival of Industry 4.0, factories will develop towards integrating all kinds of automation applications (monitoring, management, maintenance, etc.) to meet the industrial requirements of the new era. Therefore, promoting the design and deployment of wireless network structure in industrial environment has become the key point of current research. In order to better meet the requirements of industrial environment deployment in Industry 4.0 and reduce the required computing resources, this paper proposes a wireless channel modeling and simulation platform for industrial environment based on ray tracing in three-dimensional (3D) space. Firstly, for path search, we divide rays into line of sight (LOS), reflection and diffraction, and adopt the algorithm combined with 3D R-trees to greatly reduce the search complexity. Then, at the receiving end, the received power and path loss are calculated by superposition of the electric field vectors of different rays. After introducing the framework and simulation process of the platform, we compared the simulation results of the outdoor environment with the path loss specified in 3GPP to verify the reliability of the platform. Finally, we extend it to factory and measure the path loss of LOS and non line of sight (NLOS) routes at different frequencies, respectively. The results are compared and analyzed.