Graphics Hardware Accelerated Field Strength Prediction for Rural and Urban Environments

Acceleration techniques on graphics hardware for field strength prediction algorithms are presented. The authors identify some basic building blocks of common propagation algorithms and propose methods which can be very efficiently implemented on graphics processing units. They show that the use of such acceleration techniques leads to huge speedups in the evaluation time of propagation algorithms. Field strength prediction is of tremendous importance for planning, analysis, control and optimization of radio networks. For instance, coverage analysis, interference estimation as well as channel and power allocation are based on field strength prediction.