Optimal Planning of Passive Reflective Skins for Next-Generation Smart EM Urban Environments

The optimal planning of passive reflective skins installed on the building facades for implementing next-generation smart electromagnetic environments is addressed. Towards this end, a customized System-by-Design strategy is exploited to yield the best trade-off solutions between maximum coverage enhancement within selected regions of interest and overall cost/environmental impact. A suitable binary coding strategy is adopted to define the degrees-of-freedom of the planning problem at hand, which is solved by means of a customized binary genetic algorithm integrated with a learning-by-examples prediction tool for the computationally-efficient evaluation of the urban wireless coverage. An illustrative numerical example is shown to assess the effectiveness and potentialities of the proposed planning strategy in a realistic scenario.