An efficient indoor ray-tracing propagation model with a quasi-3D approach

This paper presents an indoor propagation model that uses image-based ray-tracing with a quasi-3D approach. A fast 2D algorithm finds the most relevant rays lying in the horizontal plan of the indoor environment. Then, every path is converted into five rays that lie in the vertical plane. As a consequence, the third-dimension effect is considered in the field computation. Comparisons were made with measurements for a typical indoor scenario and the quasi-3D approach results showed to be as good as the results obtained by a full 3D ray-tracing tool. With this approach, it is possible to have a computational cost comparable to that of a 2D algorithm, without significant impairment in the accuracy compared to results obtained with a 3D tool.