Reflecting Surfaces for Beyond Line-Of-Sight Coverage in Millimeter Wave Vehicular Networks

Millimeter Wave (mmWave) mobile communication networks are envisioned to provide high performance radio links as required by emerging vehicular applications such as remote driving and massive automotive sensing. However, the high penetration loss and thus a high blockage probability embody the greatest challenges in farming this frequency spectrum. For this reason, the specific utilization of reflecting surfaces, especially so-called reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) introduce a controlled and focused reflection towards the designated receiver, if the line-of-sight is obstructed. In this work, we present a latest extension to our vehicular mobility and mobile network simulation environment, which allows for coverage analysis, network planning and the evaluation of context-aware beam management strategies. Preliminary results prove, that even in a weak coverage scenario with one base station, the deployment of properly disposed RISs leads to the achievement of predefined coverage goals even with imperfect context information. Based on the outcomes, new rules to ease the placement of RISs for network planning tasks might be derived in future.