Inhomogeneous plane-wave spectrum based Physical Optics for the simulation of urban radio propagation

Characterizing the radio propagation in urban environment has become essential to the design, assessment and installation of future wireless communication systems. Benefiting from the progress in the fields of computer graphics and computational electromagnetics, the deterministic simulations have gain significant interest in the last decade since they offer the advantage of providing accurate results, thereby replacing the need for costly and complicated measurement campaigns. In this thesis, we started from an accurate method, the Physical Optics (PO), and tried to reduce its computational cost. The PO radiation integral is known to accurately capture the truncation effect due to the finite dimension of scatterers. However, at Ultra High Frequencies (UHF), the numerical integration of highly-oscillating currents is extremely time-consuming. Hence, we have developed a fast algorithm which combines the efficiency of a Fast Fourier Transform and the simplicity of an inhomogeneous plane-wave representation of the scattered fields. It substantially accelerates the computation of the radiation integrals over quasi-planar building walls at UHF down to seconds. This is a step forward towards more accurate predictions of radio propagation at cm-waves in large and complex urban environments.(FSA - Sciences de l'ingénieur) -- UCL, 201