DeepRT Engine: A Unified GPU-Parallel Ray-Tracing Framework with Hybrid SBR-IM Path Search for 6G Digital Twin Channel

Abstract

Digital twin channel (DTC) aims to establish a real-time digital counterpart of physical wireless channels for reproducing and predicting site-specific propagation characteristics. As a high-precision channel computation method for realistic propagation scenarios, ray tracing (RT) serves as a key enabler for DTC construction. However, conventional RT suffers from high complexity under serial path-searching workflows. This letter proposes DeepRT Engine (DeepRT-E), a parallel RT acceleration architecture with a three-stage physically-inspired pipeline for real-time DTC construction. Firstly, DeepRT-E constructs a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) to partition the scene and reduce redundant ray-surface intersections. Secondly, the shooting and bouncing rays (SBR) algorithm is executed through a ray-level parallel tracing framework to identify candidate surface sequences and prune the search space of the image method (IM). Finally, a parallel batched IM solver refines the retained candidates for accurate propagation-path recovery. Simulation results show that DeepRT-E reduces runtime by 96.3% and achieves a converged error of only 0.001 dB, outperforming Wireless InSite and Sionna in efficiency and accuracy.