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Fakultät für Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik

Journal article on Passive Intelligent Reflecting Surface HELIOS published

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© CNI, 2025
Graphical abstract figure from CNI used in article.
The article presents an analytical reflection model for our HELIOS reflectors, which have been developed in the scope of our on-going 6G research on Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS)-assisted mmWave communications.

Since 2020, the CNI has been investigating the use of reflecting surfaces for power- and cost-efficient beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) mmWave communications. In a recent journal article [1], we proposed the additively manufactured HELIOS (Holistic Enlightening of bLackspots with passIve reflectOr moduleS) reflector concept. In essence, it is an array of differently configured modules that share the same geometric template. The CNI’s follow-up research introduced an electromagnetic simulation-based design process, with the IRS being experimentally validated in lab [2] and indoor factory [3] conditions. Both papers received awards at the respective IEEE conferences. However, long simulation times turned out to be impractical for the design of qualitative HELIOS reflectors and rapid deployment.

Against this background, our contribution in the prestigious IEEE Wireless Communications Letters journal leveraged a physical optics technique to estimate the reflection pattern of individual HELIOS modules in terms of the radar cross section (RCS) parameter. The total reflection is subsequently attained by coherent summation with additional consideration of potential self-shadowing effects. Our article validates the overall reflection model and attests an up to 15,000x faster computation time. At the end of our work, we showcase the potential of the analytical model to improve a sample HELIOS design process aiming for a broad horizontal reflection beam. Stay tuned as our ongoing research delves deeper into this topic! The full article is openly available below.

S. Häger, S. Böcker, C. Wietfeld, "Reflection Modeling of Modular Passive IRS Geometries," in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, February 2025. DOI: 10.1109/LWC.2025.3542564. (Early access.) [pdf] [IEEE Xplore] [Details]
This research was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the course of the 6GEM Research Hub under the grant number 16KISK038.

Related works from CNI:

  1. S. Häger, K. Heimann, S. Böcker, C. Wietfeld, "Holistic Enlightening of Blackspots with Passive Tailorable Reflecting Surfaces for Efficient Urban mmWave Networks," In IEEE Access, vol. 11, pp. 39318-39332, April 2023. DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3267676.[pdf] [IEEE Xplore] [Details]
  2. S. Häger, M. Danger, K. Heimann, Y. Gümüs, S. Böcker, C. Wietfeld, "Custom Design and Experimental Evaluation of Passive Reflectors for mmWave Private Networks," in IEEE International Symposium on Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANMAN), Boston, USA, July 2024. (Best Paper Award.) [pdf] [IEEE Xplore] [Details]
  3. M. Danger, C. Arendt, H. Schippers, S. Böcker, M. Mühleisen, P. Becker, J. B. Caro, G. Gjorgjievska, M. A. Latif, J. Ansari, N. Beckmann, N. König, R. Schmitt, C. Wietfeld, "Performance Evaluation of IRS-enhanced mmWave Connectivity for 6G Industrial Networks", in IEEE International Symposium on Measurements and Networking (M&N), Rome, Italy, July 2024. (Best Paper Young Author Award.) [pdf] [IEEE Xplore] [Dataset] [Details]

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