Article Details

Abstract

Accurate simulation of radio wave propagation characteristics provides an important reference for communication engineering planning and signal quality evaluation. The parabolic equation method balances computation accuracy and efficiency and is suitable for modeling large-scale radio wave propagation scenarios. The finite-difference (FD) method is one of the primary approaches to solving parabolic equations. This method meshes the computational domain and effectively handles boundary problems under complex terrain environments. Introducing the Pade approximation into the FD method can further improve solution accuracy. According to the approximation order, the FD-Pade method can be classified into high-order and low-order methods. This study takes large-scale free-space radio wave propagation as the research scenario and establishes a relative error index to compare and analyze the solution errors of the high-order and low-order FD-Pade methods. Combined with path-loss pseudo-color maps, error comparison curves, computation time, and memory consumption, the error distribution rules of the two methods are quantitatively derived. The research results can provide an intuitive reference for the reasonable selection of parabolic equation methods in radio communication engineering.

Keywords

parabolic equation; finite difference approximation; relative error; radio wave communication

References

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Funding

New Talent Research Launch Project of Guangzhou Railway Vocational and Technical College; Guangzhou Railway Vocational and Technical College - "10+1" Research Direction - General Projects on Campus (GTXYYB250209); University Research Project of Guangzhou Education Bureau (2026316046)

About the authors

Wu Xiaoping (1994-), female, Han ethnicity, from Guangzhou, Guangdong, lecturer, doctoral student, research interests include wireless communication networks and computational electromagnetics.