STK's Urban Propagation capability extends STK's Communications capability by computing diffraction losses in an urban environment and applying them to your link budget. Urban Propagation accounts for the impacts of buildings, terrain, and ground reflections. You can assess these effects to plan for link outages and asset redundancy, and to decide the placement of antennas, flight routes, and test locations.
Urban Propagation offers an unmatched combination of fidelity and speed, as compared to empirical and full-physics alternatives, across a broader range of frequencies and link geometries. These attributes make it the ideal choice for defense and intelligence applications involving trade studies, time-based scenarios, and coverage analysis.
Urban path loss predictions are seamlessly integrated with STK's analytic models of moving platforms, communication systems, and ISR sensors. This provides a valuable mission perspective for a variety of applications including tactical mobile communications, net-centric ISR, cyber warfare, and urban tactics.
How it works
Urban Propagation uses site-specific building geometry for correspondingly higher-fidelity results. Employing the well-established Uniform Theory of Diffraction, a triple-path geodesic model computes three dominant paths from the transmitter to the receiver: one in the vertical plane and two in the horizontal plane (clockwise and counterclockwise). STK combines the received powers from these three paths to estimate total signal strength at the receiver.
Using rapid ray tracing techniques and efficient diffraction methods, STK returns loss results in milliseconds depending upon the size and complexity of the urban environment, as well as the locations of the transmitter and receiver. These almost-instant computation times allow for trade studies, time-based scenarios involving moving platforms, and coverage analysis of large areas.
You must account for initial processing of the urban geometry of your scenario; see Urban Geometry Processing.
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Urban Propagation is powered by Remcom’s Wireless InSite® propagation algorithms. Remcom, an AGI business partner, has been a pioneer in the field of electromagnetic simulation since 1994, serving multiple Department of Defense and commercial customers.
For more information on the fidelity of Remcom's Wireless InSite module, see Fidelity at High Speed: Wireless Insite Real Time Module (PDF).