Point Cloud Ray-Launching Simulations of Indoor Multipath Channels at 60 GHz

In this work we present a novel ray-launching (RL) method for field prediction utilizing a laser-scanned point cloud model of the environment. The method takes advantage of the high level of detail found in the point cloud to simulate propagation of rays as they undergo reflection and transmission through local surfaces represented by points of the point cloud. The method is implemented using MATLAB's Parallel Computing Toolbox and its GPU Computing library for straightforward parallelization and acceleration of computations. Indoor multipath channels are simulated at the 60 GHz band and compared to their measured counterparts to study accuracy of the presented method. Up to 6 reflections and 3 transmissions can be simulated in approximately 6 minutes. Utilizing a post-processing step to eliminate propagation paths with near-identical trajectories, an issue seemingly unique to point clouds, the channel is well reproduced in terms of path gains and a relative error of less than 10% for delay spread.