Toward Real-World Indoor Smart Electromagnetic Environments—A Large-Scale Experimental Demonstration

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work presents the first large-scale indoor experimental assessment of an implementation of the emerging smart electromagnetic environment (SEME) paradigm, which is based on the deployment of static-passive EM skins (SP-EMSs) to enhance the coverage in a 5-GHz Wi-Fi network. Unlike standard (laboratory-based) validations reported in the state-of-the-art (SoA) literature, the scenario at hand mimics a realistic indoor environment to replicate as close as possible the user experience (UE) when using commodity devices. Representative results from the experimental field trials are reported to confirm the performance predictions arising from the numerical studies and the tolerance analyses carried out with a commercial ray-tracing (RT) tool. Besides experimentally validating the SEME idea, this study is also aimed at (roughly) quantifying the economic advantage of an SEME implementation, relying on simple manufacturing/low-cost field manipulating devices without any additional biasing circuitry, with respect to standard approaches that imply the densification of the active radiating sources.