A Planning Strategy for Building a Heterogeneous Smart EM Environment

Abstract: This paper presents a planning strategy for the deployment of smart electromagnetic entities (SEEs) to enhance the wireless coverage and the Quality-of-Service (QoS) in large urban areas. The integration of different technological solutions such as integrated access-and-backhaul nodes (IABs), smart repeaters (SRs), and electromagnetic skins (EMSs) is here addressed to enable an effective and efficient implementation of the concept of Smart Electromagnetic Environment (SEME). By combining the features of such heterogeneous SEEs and optimizing their number, positions, orientations, and configuration, the electromagnetic (EM) coverage in a set of Regions-of-Interest (RoIs) of outdoor scenarios is recovered and/or enhanced subject to installation costs and energy consumption requirements. Numerical validations from real-world scenarios are reported to assess the effectiveness of the proposed planning scheme as well as to show the potentialities of an heterogeneous deployment of SEMEs.