The Human Blockage Impact on ARIS Assisted D2D Communication Systems

Aerial reconfigurable intelligent surface (ARIS), is an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) mounted by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), represents a promising candidate for assisting device to device (D2D) millimeter wave (mmWave) communication in temporal and urgent situations, e.g., open-air events. Because IRS can efficiently mitigate the blockage impact on mmWave propagation signal, whether it is due to static or dynamic obstacles. Scenarios of base station to devices have been widely discussed, and IRS proved its efficiently on them. But D2D communication is different as both the transmitter (TX) and the receiver (RX) have a low height in range of 1 m. Hence, both links TX-ARIS and ARIS-RX are highly susceptible to be blocked due to human bodies especially in crowded areas. Consequently, in this paper, the impact of human bodies blockage on ARIS aided D2D mmWave communication is studied. Firstly, we assure the effectiveness of using ARIS in this network to significantly enhance its performance, then, the effect of ARIS height on the blockage occurrence and system performance is investigated to find out the best height for deploying the ARIS. Our results prove that ARIS highly mitigates the blockage, reduces it by 85%, comparable to the case without it. Moreover, a high increase in system spectral efficiency, 1.2 bps/Hz, can be guaranteed, if ARIS is configured at best altitude.