Planning of EM Skins for Improved Quality-of-Service in Urban Areas

Abstract

The optimal planning of electromagnetic skins (EMSs) installed on the building facades to enhance the received signal strength, thus the wireless coverage and/or the quality-ofservice (QoS) in large-scale urban areas, is addressed. More specifically, a novel instance of the System-by-Design (SbD) paradigm is proposed towards the implementation of a smart electromagnetic environment (SEME) where low-cost passive static reflective skins are deployed to enhance the level of the power received within selected regions-of-interest (RoIs). Thanks to the ad-hoc customization of the SbD functional blocks, which includes the exploitation of a digital twin (DT) for the accurate yet fast assessment of the wireless coverage condition, effective solutions are yielded. Numerical results, dealing with realworld test-beds, are shown to assess the capabilities, the potentialities, and the current limitations of the proposed EMSs planning strategy.

Conformal Metasurfaces: a Novel Solution for Vehicular Communications

“…By contrast, IRS can offer a fully passive alternative to RIS when either the deployment cost is excessive or the incidence/reflection angles are not a-priori known and cannot be properly estimated. For instance, IRS can be deployed on buildings to enrich the environment scattering, improving the coverage and the average communication performance over different users in different positions in space [18], [29]. However, the density of building-deployed metasurfaces required for coverage might be critical in highly urbanized areas, especially to support V2V communications at the road level.…”