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

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel system-by-design approach for planning electromagnetic skins on building facades to enhance wireless coverage and QoS in urban areas, utilizing digital twins for fast assessment.

Contribution

It introduces a new EMS planning methodology using a digital twin within the SbD framework for smart electromagnetic environments in cities.

Findings

Effective EMS solutions improve wireless coverage in urban test-beds.

The digital twin accelerates coverage assessment.

Limitations identified for current EMS deployment strategies.

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-of-service (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 real-world test-beds, are shown to assess the capabilities, the potentialities, and the current limitations of the proposed EMSs planning strategy.