On the Design of Modular Reflecting EM Skins for Enhanced Urban Wireless Coverage

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel design approach for modular electromagnetic skins on buildings, enhancing urban millimeter-wave coverage through optimized passive metasurface layouts using multi-objective optimization.

Contribution

It introduces a new design strategy for passive, modular EMSs on building facades, optimizing tile placement for improved wireless coverage with minimal complexity.

Findings

Optimized EMS layouts significantly improve signal coverage.

The proposed method reduces the number of tiles needed for effective coverage.

Numerical results demonstrate the potential of EMS in smart electromagnetic environments.

Abstract

The design of modular, passive, and static artificial metasurfaces to be used as electromagnetic skins (EMSs) of buildings for improving the coverage in urban millimeter-wave communication scenarios is addressed. Towards this end, an ad-hoc design strategy is presented to determine optimal trade-off implementative solutions that assure a suitable coverage of the areas of interest, where the signal from the base station is too weak, with the minimum complexity. More specifically, the admissible surface in the building facade is first partitioned into tiles, which are the minimum-size elements of the artificial coating (i.e., the building block of an EMS). Then, the search for the optimal EMS layout (i.e., the minimum number and the positions of the tiles to be installed) is carried out with a binary multi-objective optimization method. Representative numerical results are reported and discussed to point out the features and the potentialities of the EMS solution in the smart electromagnetic environment (SEME) as well as the effectiveness of the proposed design method.