A Multihop Strategy for the Planning of EM Skins in a Smart Electromagnetic Environment

This article deals with the electromagnetic (EM) planning of static and passive EM skins (EMSs) in complex urban scenarios to improve the EM coverage of the base-station (BTS) antenna by means of a set of multihop (MH) cascaded reflections. Toward this end, an innovative system-by-design (SbD)-based method is developed where wireless links of arbitrary “depth,” which are implemented through multiple anomalous cascaded reflections, are optimized. Representative numerical results, concerned with real-world scenarios, are analyzed to assess the capabilities and the potentialities of such an instance of the so- called smart EM environment (SEME).