Understanding how forested environments support radiowave propagation is fundamental to the design, development, and implementation of advanced wireless communication and remote sensing antenna systems. The current understanding of wave propagation in forested environments, however, is limited by their complexity. The forest setting includes electrically large and inhomogeneous regions of interest composed of neither regular periodic structures nor completely random media. Thus, realistic modeling and analysis of forest propagation gives rise to severe computational challenges. The objective of this project is to utilize the latest advances in fast and scalable integral equation-based computational electromagnetics (CEM) algorithms to advance the understanding of radiowave propagation and antenna operation in forested environments. The investigators are developing CEM solvers on supercomputing clusters specially tailored for efficient and accurate simulation of wave propagation in realistic forested environments. They are employing these fast solvers to generate a multi-dimensional database of propagation loss as a function of range, antenna height, frequency, polarization, and tree morphology and distribution. The investigators are exploiting this database to identify dominant and possibly new propagation phenomena and to design novel small antenna systems that efficiently couple radiated power to the identified propagation mechanisms.
This project demonstrates how the latest CEM solvers can be effectively tailored and deployed on high-performance computers to analyze complex systems in nature. The methodology developed can also benefit other applications involving wave interactions with synthetic media such as electromagnetic metamaterials. The project will improve electromagnetics research and education infrastructure at the University of Texas at Austin as it is fostering collaboration between a new junior faculty member with expertise in fast CEM solvers and a senior faculty member involved in major programs on forest communication channel studies. The investigators are disseminating research findings through various outreach activities that involve underrepresented minorities.
