A feasibility study on the extension of the point scatterer formulation to raised canopy forests

This paper presents a feasibility study on the extension of the point scatterer formulation to characterise the electromagnetic behaviour of tree trunk formations. The original propagation model, successfully used in the canopy layer, uses various point scatterers with specific radiation characteristics, distributed within a computational volume, to describe the effect of the trees present in the radiowave propagation path. Subsequently, a ray-tracing based algorithm is used to gather all the interactions between the different point scatterers present in the simulation channel. This propagation model is now extended and applied to the trunk layer. To this extent, re-radiation measurements of both metallic and dielectric cylinders were performed in a controlled environment, inside an anechoic chamber, at 9.4, 18.8 and 37.6 GHz, were used to assess the model performance when dealing with single and isolated tree trunks. The proposed propagation model was then assessed against directional spectra measurements conducted within tree trunk formation scenarios at 9.4, 18.8 and 37.6 GHz. Additionally, a comparison analysis with a discretised radiative energy transfer (dRET) approach is conducted, where a relatively good agreement has been found.