3D Wi-Fi Signal Measurement in Realistic Digital Twin Testbed Environments Using Ray Tracing

2026-02-12

IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement

AI Summary

This study addresses the insufficient accuracy of existing indoor wireless propagation models, which hinders the efficient deployment of next-generation systems such as Wi-Fi 6E/7. The authors propose a high-fidelity digital twin–based simulation framework that integrates LiDAR-reconstructed 3D environments, ITU-R standard material parameters, and GPU-accelerated ray tracing. For the first time, this approach enables frequency-dependent material attenuation modeling and computes path-level channel characteristics—including delay, power, angular spread, and Ricean K-factor. Compared to commercial simulators, the method achieves up to a 21 dB improvement in line-of-sight path gain and significantly enhanced SINR under equivalent runtime constraints. After calibration with measured RSSI data, the simulated spatial correlation reaches 0.98, demonstrating strong fidelity for multi-band coverage analysis across 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz bands.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Simulating Human Behavior

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems

Abstract

Accurate and efficient modeling of indoor wireless signal propagation is crucial for the deployment of next-generation Wi-Fi. This paper presents a digital twin-based measurement system that integrates real-world 3D environment reconstruction with deterministic ray tracing for physically grounded electromagnetic modeling. Building geometry is obtained through LiDAR scanning, followed by object segmentation and assignment of ITU-R standard material parameters. The propagation process is simulated with a GPU-accelerated ray-tracing engine that generates path-level channel attributes, including delay, power, angular dispersion, and Ricean K-factor. Under identical runtime constraints, the proposed system is evaluated against a commercial measurement simulator, demonstrating up to 21 dB higher path gain and consistently improved signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio in line-of-sight conditions. Additionally, experiments against onsite RSSI measurements confirm a high spatial correlation of 0.98 after calibration, proving the system's fidelity in real-world settings. Furthermore, coverage analysis across 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz bands demonstrates the capability of system to model frequency-dependent material attenuation for Wi-Fi 6E/7 networks. Finally, the system offers interactive 3D visualization and on-demand data extraction, highlighting its potential for digital twin-driven wireless system design and optimization.

Problem

• 3D Wi-Fi signal propagation
• digital twin
• indoor wireless modeling
• ray tracing
• Wi-Fi 6E/7

Innovation

• Digital Twin
• Ray Tracing
• LiDAR-based 3D Reconstruction
• GPU-accelerated Simulation
• Frequency-dependent Material Modeling