Modeling Indoor Wave Propagation Scenes With Simple Or Multilayer Walls

This article is part of a series of guest columns by Kaz Sabet, Ph.D., President, EMAG Technologies Inc.

In the three previous installments of this column we examined a number of wave propagation problems whose solutions required multi-scale modeling approaches [1-3]. Examples of these included networks of unattended near-ground sensors and link analysis in multipath environments with highly directional transmitter and receiver antennas. It was shown that using a combination of asymptotic techniques like ray tracing and full-wave numerical techniques, it was possible to formulate approximate solutions to such problems. These hybrid approaches provide reasonable accuracy while being practical from a computational point of view. In this article, we will adopt a similar hybrid approach to tackle the problem of indoor wave propagation, especially when the scene involves walls with complex material compositions and interior structures.