Deterministic UWB Channel Modeling Using Ray Tracing Approach

Two major model sets are used to model a radio wave propagation problem. The first is empirical, based on measurements and statistics. Empirical models are easy to implement and fast. They only consider Tx-Rx separation and thus are not accurate enough as different objects of the environment are not taken into account. The second is deterministic exploiting physical laws to simulate signal propagation. Deterministic propagation prediction models based on a combination of Geometrical Optics (GO) and the Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD) represent the unique solution for reliable estimations. The most famous of the second approach is the well-known ray tracing like model, based on the computation of the different paths according to the geometrical optical laws. Concerning the transmitted signal bandwidth (BW), the propagation channel appears differently to Ultra Wideband (UWB) wireless systems than it does to Narrow Band (NB) sine wave systems. The main objective of this paper is to develop a ray tracing Matlab code to estimate the power received as a function of frequency in a given environment. The results were experimentally validated according to time domain corporation specifications where the BW was selected to cover the 3.1-5.3 GHz band with center frequency of 4.3 GHz.