Progress in parallel implementation of the multilevel plane wave time domain algorithm

The computational complexity and memory requirements of classical schemes for evaluating transient electromagnetic fields produced by Ns dipoles active for Nt time steps scale as O(NtN s 2) and O(Ns 2), respectively. The multilevel plane wave time domain (PWTD) algorithm [A.A. Ergin et al., Antennas and Propagation Magazine, IEEE, vol. 41, pp. 39-52, 1999], viz. the extension of the frequency domain fast multipole method (FMM) to the time domain, reduces the above costs to O(NtNslog2Ns) and O(Ns α) with α = 1.5 for surface current distributions and α = 4/3 for volumetric ones. Its favorable computational and memory costs notwithstanding, serial implementations of the PWTD scheme unfortunately remain somewhat limited in scope and ill-suited to tackle complex real-world scattering problems, and parallel implementations are called for. © 2013 IEEE.