Features and Potentialities of Static Passive EM Skins for NLOS Specular Wireless Links
Giacomo Oliveri, Marco Salucci, Andrea Massa
TL;DR
The paper addresses non-line-of-sight specular wireless links at mmWave frequencies by proposing static, flat EMS skins that lens reflected energy toward the receiver. It derives a closed-form upper bound on the total path attenuation (TPA) achievable with an EMS and establishes an optimality condition for the EMS aperture that guarantees performance gains over conventional screens. Through extensive numerical experiments, the results show that EMS-based screens can outperform finite-size PCSs and even the asymptotic infinite-PEC limit for sufficiently large apertures, with performance improving as the receiver distance increases or as transmitter/receiver gains rise. The work provides practical design guidelines and quantifies the potential QoS improvements for fixed wireless access and related SEME-enabled applications.
Abstract
The ability of passive flat patterned electromagnetic skins (EMSs) to overcome the asymptotic limit of the total path attenuation (TPA) of flat metallic reflectors of arbitrary size in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) specular wireless links is assessed. Closed-form expressions for the achievable TPA in EMS-powered NLOS links as well as the condition on the panel size of EMS-screens to improve the performance of flat passive conductive screens (PCSs) with the same aperture are derived and numerically validated by considering different incidence angles, screen apertures, transmitter/receiver distances, antenna gains, meta-atom geometries, and carrier frequencies.