Coverage Improvements for Sub-Terahertz Systems Under Shadowing Conditions

Radio propagation in the millimeter wave and sub-terahertz domain is heavily affected by shadowing conditions. The communication link is blocked without any additional technical means being used. Coverage improvements can be provided by using reflectors, RIS arrays, and repeaters to direct radio waves around corners or obstacles. These concepts show different performance and complexity levels affecting their network deployment. This paper investigates the achievable radio range or the received power to compare specific deployment concepts under realistic propagation conditions. Overall, the repeater solution provides either the largest radio range or the lowest necessary total transmit power compared to reflectors or RIS arrays and, thereby, is the most sustainable approach. A RIS array requires an additional centralized signal processing capacity for calculating optimized RIS settings and results in the highest level of network deployment complexity.