Supercomputing-Enabled First-Principles Analysis of Radio Wave Propagation in Urban Environments

Wireless communications are expected to take place in increasingly complicated scenarios, such as dense urban, forest, tunnel, and other cluttered environments. A key emerging challenge is to understand the physics and characteristics of wave propagation in these environments, which is critical for the analysis, design, and application of advanced mobile and wireless communication systems. In this paper, we present a full-wave field-based computational methodology for radio wave propagation in complex urban environments. Both transmitting/receiving antennas and propagation environments are modeled by first-principles calculations. A system-level, large scene analysis is enabled by the scalable, ultraparallel algorithms on the emerging high-performance computing platforms. The proposed computational framework is verified and validated with semianalytical models and representative measurements.