Transmissive Metasurfaces Assisted Wireless Communications on Railways: Channel Strength Evaluation and Performance Analysis

Abstract

We propose a new wireless paradigm for railways – transmissive metasurface (TMS) assisted communications. It compensates for the Doppler shift brought by high mobility and reduces signal degradation due to train carriages. Specifically, the elements of the TMS panel attached to train windows manipulate the links between the base station (BS) and the onboard users. One fundamental problem with it is: does the channel introduced by TMS outperform the traditional direct channel? To answer this, we compare the gains of direct and cascaded channels and introduce the cascaded-outperform-direct probability (CODP), which is the probability that the latter exceeds the former. We then derive two simplified closed-form CODP expressions by approximating the cascaded channel gain as mixed Gaussian and Gamma distributions. Moreover, BS-related parameters impact the CODP; we show that the CODP has (i) global maximum points concerning the azimuth angle of the path from the BS to the TMS, the distance from the BS to the railway, and the BS height, respectively, and (ii) a minimum point in terms of the azimuth angle of the path from the BS to the TMS. Finally, we provide numerical results to verify our analysis and derivations.