Radio Frequency Ray Tracing

This chapter discusses high performance ray-based radio frequency (RF) simulation and visualization using Embree and OSPRay. Predictive simulation and visualization of radio frequency energy propagation is critical to planning, analyzing, and optimizing wireless networks, and radio frequency ray tracing (RFRT) offers several advantages over other methods. First, modifications necessary to simulate RF energy transfer are fairly straightforward. Second, RFRT generates the full signal trajectory, allowing computation and visualization of signal characteristics that are extremely costly, or even impossible, with other methods. Finally, RFRT scales effectively, both with geometric complexity and with core count. The chapter examines the key design principles of our combined RFRT simulation/visualization approach, with code samples illustrating effective use of parallelism in this context.