Towards Real-World Indoor Smart Electromagnetic Environments -- A Large-Scale Experimental Demonstration

TL;DR

This work tackles the challenge of reliably delivering indoor 5 GHz Wi-Fi by deploying static-passive EM skins (SP-EMS) to realize a real-world SEME. It combines large-scale indoor field trials with ray-tracing-based propagation modeling, tolerance analyses, and a total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison to Active AP densification. The authors demonstrate a first-of-its-kind, low-cost SP-EMS deployment that yields measurable improvements in received power, user throughput, and latency, while remaining robust to placement tolerances. The results suggest SP-EMS-based SEME can outperform traditional densification economically and practically, supporting scalable, mass-market deployment in real buildings.

Abstract

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this work presents the first large-scale indoor experimental assessment of an implementation of the emerging Smart ElectroMagnetic Environment (SEME) paradigm, which is based on the deployment of static-passive EM skins (SP-EMSs) to enhance the coverage in a 5 [GHz] Wi-Fi network. Unlike standard (laboratory-based) validations reported in the state-of-the-art (SoA) literature, the scenario at hand mimics a realistic indoor environment to replicate as close as possible the user experience when using commodity devices. Representative results from the experimental field trials are re-ported to confirm the performance predictions arising from the numerical studies and the tolerance analyses carried out with a commercial ray-tracing (RT) tool. Besides experimentally validating the SEME idea, this study is also aimed at (roughly) quantifying the economic advantage of a SEME implementation, relying on simple-manufacturing/low-cost field manipulating devices without any additional biasing circuitry, with respect to standard approaches that imply the densification of the active radiating sources.