An efficient, full-wave computational technique to investigate the electromagnetic wave propagation within a complex building environment, resulting from contemporary indoor communication systems, is proposed. Unlike a standard ray-tracing technique, this new methodology is based on the parabolic wave equation (PE), appropriately modified to deal with the extremely wide-angle propagation cases, encountered in a typical wireless system of this kind. It is also successfully applied to model the field in the presence of walls, doors or other penetrable structures, taking into account the exact geometric configuration of the environment under consideration. Next, the PE technique is significantly enhanced by an integral equation formulation, in which the computed field in the interior of the walls and other obstacles is used as a secondary equivalent current source and a corrected version of the electromagnetic field is recalculated in the whole indoor environment. This combined approach has all the advantages of a full wave method, does not call for a highly dense mesh, and it also has moderate requirements of computational resources.
['Theofilogiannakos Gk', 'Traianos V. Yioultsis', 'Thomas D. Xenos']
An Efficient Hybrid Parabolic Equation --- Integral Equation Method for the Analysis of Wave Propagation in Highly Complex Indoor Communication Environments