Differentiable High-Performance Ray Tracing-Based Simulation of Radio Propagation with Point Clouds

TL;DR

This paper introduces a differentiable ray tracing-based simulator for radio propagation that operates on point clouds, enabling fast, accurate simulations and the potential to learn environment electromagnetic properties using segmentation labels.

Contribution

It presents a novel differentiable simulation method for radio propagation directly on point clouds, combining efficiency with the ability to learn electromagnetic properties.

Findings

Simulates multi-bounce propagation with up to five interactions in under 90 ms.

Efficiently models specular reflections and diffuse scattering.

Demonstrates potential for learning electromagnetic properties from segmentation labels.

Abstract

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.