A simulation study of ray-tracing software in through-wall sensing (TWS) applications

This paper analyzes the suitability of commercially-available propagation software to model large scale through-wall synthetic aperture radar (SAR) scenarios via ray-tracing. Performance criteria were established and compared with results from finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) algorithms. While there are physical restrictions to the range of applicability, algorithms based on ray-tracing are sufficiently accurate and readily adaptable for use in a simulation environment, and can do so much more efficiently than standard FDTD methods.