Demonstration of mm-Wave Smart Electromagnetic Skin for NOMA Communication in Near-Field

In this work, we demonstrate the practical application of a passive Smart Electromagnetic Skin (SES) in a mm-Wave communication context. In the indoor scenario considered, a Base Station (BS) serves two users in the same time and frequency slot using Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) as the multiplexing strategy. One user is in the Line-of-Sight (LOS) of the BS, while the other is in its blind zone and receives coverage from the SES. The BS and SES operate at a central frequency of 24.45 GHz with a bandwidth of 400 MHz. The design and prototyping of the communication testbed are based on Software-Defined Radio (SDR). Provided results are based on channel power and over-the-air Symbol Error Rate (SER) measurements for various NOMA strategies and user positioning.