A combined ray tracing and FDTD method for modeling indoor radio wave propagation

In this paper, a combined ray tracing and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is presented for more accurate modelling of indoor radio wave propagation. In this method, ray tracing is used to analyse wide areas and FDTD is used to study areas close to complex discontinuities where exact solutions are not available. The major electromagnetic effects of the discontinuities are local in nature and usually are confined very closely to the edge or corner. Therefore the FDTD method is to be applied to regions with the dimension of only a few wavelengths surrounding these objects instead or the entire modelling area. This would ensure the practicality in terms of computing resource.