Investigation of rough surfaces for propagation modeling in caves

Making wireless communications available in caves is important, it will benefit several activities that are caves-related such as volcanology, speleo-biology, speleo-archeology, hydrology, military reconnaissance, and cave exploration. Besides, it will also enhance the safety of the operation of show caves like the tourist caves and furthermore, may assist in the search and rescue operation in caves. In this paper, we study the behavior of radio waves on a random rough surface using ray tracing technique that incorporates a special twist to the Fresnel reflection coefficient to account for the scattering effects arising from that rough surface. The findings of our work lays a foundation for further investigation to be conducted in actual cave environment, since the ground surface inside a cave is definitely not smooth but rough.