From Smart Entities Design to the Smart EM Planning and Optimization

The Smart ElectroMagnetic Environment (SEME) is a revolutionary paradigm that is expected to become a fundamental pillar in the design of next generation wireless communication systems. It is based on the disruptive idea that the environment should be regarded, differently from the past, as an additional degree-of-freedom (DoF) to improve the overall Quality-of-Service (QoS), rather than an uncontrollable obstacle to the propagation of electromagnetic (EM) waves. In this thesis, firstly an optimal planning of electromagnetic skins (EMSs) in outdoor wireless scenarios is addressed to restore/enhance the received power in a given region-of-interest (RoI). Towards this aim, a novel instance of the System-by-Design (SbD) paradigm is developed to solve the arising SEME optimal planning problem exploiting either single-hop (SH) or multi-hop (MH) links between the base-station (BTS) and the RoI. Finally, the implementation of a heterogeneous SEME is also faced by creating alternative paths for the transmission of the EM waves adopting novel and different types of network nodes [e.g., static passive EMSs (SP-EMSs), reconfigurable passive EMSs (RP-EMSs), smart repeaters (SRs), and integrated-access backhaul nodes (IABs),...]. Positioning and configuring such devices in an optimal manner is not a trivial task. Thus, an automated planning strategy has been developed to build a large-scale SEME by optimally placing different types of smart EM entities (SEEs) in the scenario to guarantee the best trade-off between EM network performance (e.g., coverage and QoS), installation costs and energy consumption. Numerical results, dealing with real-world test-beds, are shown to assess the capabilities, the potentialities, and the current limitations of the proposed planning strategies.