Electromagnetic Modeling of High-Frequency Links With High-Resolution Terrain Data

A quasi-deterministic model for the analysis of the electromagnetic propagation and estimation of main link parameters in fixed microwave and millimeter-wave links operating within urban or suburban environments is presented. The propagation geometry is modeled by a triangular mesh from the transformation of high-resolution LIDAR data. Subsequently, an efficient physical optics approximation is employed for the estimation of the mean scattered field power from surfaces within the main beams of the antennas. Random realizations of principal reflected and scattered fields constituents superimposed to the direct field allow for the prediction of worst-case link performance, in terms of outage probability, power delay spread, and cross-polar discrimination, for different design parameters: antenna position, gain, and height. The computations are compared to measurements of fixed links at 40 GHz.