How Much Can Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Augment Sky Visibility: A Stochastic Geometry Approach

This paper uses the theory of point processes and stochastic geometry to quantify the sky visibility experienced by users located in an outdoor environment. The general idea is to represent the buildings of this environment as a stationary marked point process, where the points represent the building locations and the marks their heights. The point process framework is first used to characterize the distribution of the blockage angle, which limits the visibility of a typical user into the sky due to the obstruction by buildings. In the context of communications, this distribution is useful when users try to connect to the nodes of an aerial or non-terrestrial network in a Line-of-Sight way. Within this context, the point process framework can also be used to investigate the gain of connectivity obtained thanks to Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces. Assuming that such surfaces are installed on the top of buildings to extend the user’s sky visibility, this point process approach allows one to quantify the gain in visibility and hence the gain in connectivity obtained by the typical user. The distributional properties of visibility-related metrics are cross-validated by comparison to simulation results and 3GPP measurements.