Opal: An open source ray-tracing propagation simulator for electromagnetic characterization.

Accurate characterization and simulation of electromagnetic propagation can be obtained by ray-tracing methods, which are based on a high frequency approximation to the Maxwell equations and describe the propagating field as a set of propagating rays, reflecting, diffracting and scattering over environment elements. However, this approach has been usually too computationally costly to be used in large and dynamic scenarios, but this situation is changing thanks the increasing availability of efficient ray-tracing libraries for graphical processing units. In this paper we present Opal, an electromagnetic propagation simulation tool implemented with ray-tracing on graphical processing units, which is part of the Veneris framework.