Astigmatic Beam Tracing for Gtd/Utd Methods in 3-d cOmplex Environments

Abstract

Asymptotic techniques are usually employed for electromagnetic analysis of large and complex scenarios. Determination of ray paths from source to observation region is the first stage of a computation. Beam tracing methods, formerly developed for computer graphics, ensure continuous scenario coverage overcoming drawbacks of usual ray tracing. In this paper these are extended for application to electromagnetic analysis and improved to solve for multiple order interactions with scatterers by resorting to the astigmatic beam scheme. Wedge diffraction is solved recursively by minimising an aberration error. A numerical analysis has been performed for comparisons with a backward ray tracer showing a good agreement of results.