Playable ray tracing for real-time exploration of radio propagation in wireless networks.

Planning of cellular networks is a process in which network engineers select locations for the cellular antennas and adjust parameters like transmission frequency, transmission power and tilt. The goal of network planning is to provide cellular coverage in places that are populated while decreasing interference between nearby antennas. To compute the coverage and interference, a geospatial model of the environment is created and radio propagation models are used for simulating the propagation of the electromagnetic waves. In this paper, we demonstrate a ray tracing tool that we have developed for computation of radio propagation. The tool computes the radio propagation over a 3D model of the world and presents the result as a heat map, in real time. The two main novelties of the system are (1) the ability to play the radio propagation as a video, for analyzing the effect of obstacles on the signal strength in different locations, and (2) inverse ray tracing which finds for a given location the antennas whose transmission affects the cellular signal or the interference at that location.