Tabulated Interaction Method for electromagnetic wave propagation prediction in rural and mountainous areas

An efficient method is proposed for computing electromagnetic wave propagation over terrain profiles. The paper extends the Tabulated Interaction Method (TIM) [1], applying it to the problem of 2D wave scattering from lossy surfaces using a coupled surface integral equation formulation. The proposed method is compared with the Forward Backward Method (FBM) [2] which is the exact solution in terms of accuracy and run time. Two types of terrain profiles, slightly rough terrains and very rough terrains, were used to illustrate the robustness of the proposed method. Moreover, two types of polarization, TE and TM are investigated in this paper. The numerical analysis demonstrates that the TIM has a dramatically lower computational complexity and storage than the FBM.