GPU accelerated ray launching for high-fidelity virtual test drives of VANET applications

Abstract

Due to the complexity of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, future driving assistance systems need to be validated through virtual test drives in a simulated environment. An accurate modeling of the vehicle-to-vehicle communication channel is crucial to enable a precise evaluation of such networkaware applications. Since existing ray-based methods cause long computation times, a new parallel GPU-based ray-launching simulation method is presented. The algorithmic improvements allow a high utilization of the GPU computing power, which results in significantly faster simulations while achieving high accuracy. The validation of the simulation results against realworld measurements showed a high level of agreement.

Investigation of Massive Mimo Scenarios Involving Rooftop Propagation by Bidirectional Ray-Tracing

“…All computations are executed in parallel on a GPU by means of NVIDIA OptiX TM and Thrust CUDA libraries, whenever possible [13,14].…”

3-D Ray Tracing Based GPU Accelerated Field Prediction Radio Channel Simulator

“…Therefore some sort of capturing surface for diffracting edges has to be modeled. Here we enclose the convex edges of building in cylinders which is the approach used for example in [9]. A ray hitting such a cylinder is considered to be diffracted.…”

“…Especially, we utilize the CUDA based OptiX engine [5], which provides a general purpose ray tracing platform. This approach has been used earlier in the work by Schiller et al [9], which provided some guidelines for our implementation. In the solution, computation of paths was separated from the EM calculations, which were executed as a postprocessing step in Matlab.…”

“…Most of the rays launched do not provide any paths that reach the receiver. As a method for reducing the number of rays launched, Schiller et al [9] proposed the SBR approach, where the sizes of the receiver spheres and edge cylinders are gradually decreased while the ray sampling density is increased.…”

“…The simulator is generic in nature, because only electromagnetic theory is needed for its theoretical basis. Although GPU based ray tracing is fairly commonly used for wireless channels [8] [9], modelling satellite channels using this approach has not been published according to our best knowledge.…”