Wave Propagation Using the Photon Path Map

In wireless network planning, much effort is spent on the improvement of the network and transport layer -- especially for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Although in principle real-world measurements are necessary for this, their setup is often too complex and costly. Hence good and reliable simulation tools are needed. In this work we present a new physical layer simulation algorithm based on the extension and adaptation of recent techniques for global illumination simulation. By combining and improving these highly efficient algorithms from the field of Computer Graphics, it is possible to build a fast and flexible utility to be used for wireless network simulation. We compute a discrete sampling of the volumetric electromagnetic field by tracing stochastically generated photon paths through the scene. This so called Photon Path Map is then used to estimate the field density at any point in space and also provides local information about the delay spread. The algorithm can be applied to three dimensional indoor as well as outdoor scenarios without any changes and the path-tracing costs scale only logarithmically with the growing complexity of the underlying scene geometry.