Guest Column
Wave Propagation Modeling In Near-Ground Sensor Networks — Part II: Surface Wave Effects
This article is part of a series of guest columns by Kaz Sabet, Ph.D., President, EMAG Technologies Inc.
Accurate propagation models play an important role in the design and optimization of wireless systems. With the availability of simulation tools such as EM.CUBE®, wireless engineers are now able to evaluate the performance of a wireless system in a virtual environment before their costly actual deployment. EM.CUBE's Propagation Module allows wireless engineers to construct propagation scenes consisting of terrain, building models, and other scatterers. One can then place grids of transmitters and receivers across the scene to calculate coverage maps and perform link budget analysis. A typical wireless propagation scene is very large in electrical size, and the length scales involved are usually in the order of hundreds to thousands of wavelengths. As a result, full-wave electromagnetic modeling techniques such as the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method or finite element method (FEM) are not practical for solving this type of problems.
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