Simulation Software for Radio Wave Propagation in V2X-applications

Abstract:
The simulation of radio-wave propagation for dozens of vehicles is a quite complicated task. Analytic models, based on the Maxwell’s equations, are computationally too heavy to be used for the solution of complex scenarios. Empirical models, on the other hand, lack the level of accuracy necessary to investigate this kind of use cases. In this paper, a solution based on the ray-tracing algorithm is presented. The idea behind ray-tracing is to simplify the problem by considering only the linear propagation of a limited amount of rays emitted by a transmitter. The presented solution explicitly considers reflection, refraction, as well as Doppler effect and antenna polarization and, thus, is more accurate than empirical models used in standard network simulators. The tool can be integrated with other simulation software such that complex use cases in V2X-communication can be accurately simulated also at physical level. Additionally, the algorithm is parallelized such that it performs highly efficiently on a CUDA GPU platform and hence the ray propagation is solved almost in real-time. Some simulation examples are presented to show the efficacy and the flexibility of the simulation tool for the analysis of the received power at vehicles on a freeway.