Accurate Vegetation Models with Low Computational Complexity for Ray Tracing

The frequency bands for communication standards are continuously increasing, as it can be seen from fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G communications. This is done, to increase the capabilities of communication systems and enable new technologies, e.g. autonomous driving and wireless sensor networks. Therefore, reliable channel characterization methods, such as ray tracing, are needed to implement and guarantee the functionality of these new technologies. The effects of vegetation on ray tracing simulations are often times dismissed, due to their modeling challenges and high resulting computational overhead for simulations, as well as their generally small influence on the communication channel. However, with increasing frequencies for 5G, these effects cannot be dismissed anymore. So despite the modeling challenges, vegetation effects have to be included in ray tracing simulations for an accurate channel characterization. This paper aims to create a vegetation model with low computational complexity for ray tracing simulations, while depicting the effects of real vegetation as close as possible. It is shown, that even simple approaches to model vegetation with low computational overhead are often times sufficient to capture significant effects on the communication channel.