Differentiable High-Performance Ray Tracing-Based Simulation of Radio Propagation with Point Clouds
This work addresses the need for efficient and accurate radio propagation simulation for wireless communication systems, though it appears incremental by combining existing ray tracing with point clouds and differentiability.
The authors tackled the problem of simulating radio propagation by developing a differentiable ray tracing simulator that operates directly on point clouds, achieving simulations of multi-bounce paths with up to five interactions in under 90 ms per indoor scenario. They also demonstrated how this differentiability can be used to learn electromagnetic properties from segmentation labels.
Ray tracing is a widely used deterministic method for radio propagation simulations, capable of producing physically accurate multipath components. The accuracy depends on the quality of the environment model and its electromagnetic properties. Recent advances in computer vision and machine learning have made it possible to reconstruct detailed environment models augmented with semantic segmentation labels. In this letter, we propose a differentiable ray tracing-based radio propagation simulator that operates directly on point clouds. We showcase the efficiency of our method by simulating multi-bounce propagation paths with up to five interactions with specular reflections and diffuse scattering in two indoor scenarios, each completing in less than 90 ms. Lastly, we demonstrate how the differentiability of electromagnetic computations can be combined with segmentation labels to learn the electromagnetic properties of the environment.