HPC enabled FDTD Channel Modeling for Dense Urban Scenes in the HF/VHF Band

In this SBIR solicitation, the Army has identified a need to develop a highly accurate and efficient finite-difference-time-domain (FDTD) electromagnetic wave propagation software that is portable onto high performance computers (HPCs). The software shall be able to simulate electromagnetic (EM) wave propagation at High Frequency (HF) and Very High Frequency (VHF) bands. Applications include modeling and simulation (M&S) of mobile radio network performance in a large dense urban environment. XL Scientific proposes to build a full-wave simulation software that solves Maxwells equations using a discontinuous Galerkin time domain (DGTD) domain decomposition (DD) method. Use of the DD technique will enable us to handle multi-scale, extreme-size computational domains. The DD method requires decomposition of the computational domain into smaller subdomains. Each subdomain is gridded independently with an unstructured mesh. Then the Maxwells equations are discretized to a system of semi-discrete ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Both explicit and implicit solvers will be developed for solving the ODEs. Theoretically, the explicit method will be equivalent to the FDTD method. But the DGTD method is more flexible and efficient than the FDTD in terms of dealing with complex geometries and time integration. The software will be parallelized and runs on distributed-memory HPC computers.