Comparison of FDTD and TDWP Methods for Simulating Electromagnetic Wave Propagation above Terrains

Abstract Researchers have always been in face of path loss calculation in different media for applications such as telecommunication link design. Wave propagation calculations in large spaces using the FDTD method is time-consuming and imposes a great computational burden. For this reason, to replace the classical FDTD method for wave propagation simulation and path loss calculation in large spaces, optimized methods, namely TDWP, have been provided. In this paper, the use of the TDWP method for wave propagation simulation and path loss calculation above a terrain is investigated. Longitudinal components of ground-waves are taken into account (including direct waves, ground reflections, and surface waves). Propagation space is longitudinally divided into smaller FDTD windows with finite length. The electromagnetic pulse travels through these windows from left to right to the desired point. But despite its capability in reducing computational burden and increasing processing speed, TDWP has lower precision in instantaneous field simulation and calculation of propagation coefficients, so that results obtained from FDTD and TDWP are clearly different. In this paper, some efficient methods are proposed, which yield an increase in method accuracy.