'Slayp-nir': The fastest horse in Norse mythology, capable of traversing any terrain on eight legs.
Working with senior C++ developer, Gareth Evans, the loading of data was re-designed from scratch to not only make it faster but format and resolution agnostic. By doing this from the outset, different text data sources could be rapidly loaded into memory to form a single, seamless elevation model. For urban LIDAR this means a city tile with voids at the edges can be layered on top of a 100km 30m DSM tile to fill voids. The step between the two formats is indistinguishable to the human eye.
This benefits not only city planners frustrated by the unsightly hard edges at city limits but also the emerging DIY Drone LIDAR market where users might submit their own very small tile to CloudRF covering just a forest block for example. With this engine you can backfill the surrounding area to fit your high resolution 1m Drone LIDAR onto some lower resolution DSM like 20m for example.
The changes required to make this solution could not be done by adding more code to Signal-Server which as a fork of the much older SPLAT! engine was becoming difficult to maintain and has well documented problems in its public commit history with handling rectangular LIDAR tiles or tiles which span the Greenwich Meridian.
CloudRF has a long and proud history of using and supporting open source software, starting with SPLAT! in 2011 but this re-design and re-build from scratch allowed for a fresh licence. Sleipnir will not be open source and for this reason will not contain GPL licensed code from SPLAT! or Signal Server. It has faster, Intel CPU optimised, implementations of the same public domain models found in Signal server (ITM, Hata, COST231, SUI, ECC, Ericsson,ITU-R P.525) except for the ITWOM 3.0 model which has been excluded as its license and provenance is unclear.
 Signal-Server LOS model |
 Sleipnir Free space path loss including LOS |
A key difference in how Sleipnir's models work is line-of-sight (LOS) analysis. With Signal-Server, LOS was an optional mode, comparable to a propagation model which meant basic models like ITU-R P.525 (Free space path loss) would continue to show coverage behind obstacles unless knife-edge-diffraction was explicitly enabled.
With Sleipnir, LOS is factored into every model by default so you will always see the impact of obstacles. Beyond obstacle diffraction can also be modelled with optional knife-edge-diffraction.
What this means for basic models is that you now get a result which combines line of sight with the model. Perfect for microwave links requiring a high SNR.