The Stability of The Longley-Rice Irregular Terrain Model for Typical Problems

In this paper, we analyze the numerical stability of the popular Longley-Rice Irregular Terrain Model (ITM). This model is widely used to plan wireless networks and in simulation-validated research and hence its stability is of fundamental importance to the correctness of a large amount of work. We take a systematic approach by first porting the reference ITM implementation to a multiprecision framework and then generating loss predictions along many random paths using real terrain data. We find that the ITM is not unstable for common numerical precisions and practical prediction scenarios.