Initial Analysis of Dynamic Panel Activation for Large Intelligent Surfaces

Large intelligent surfaces (LIS) have the potential to be the beyond-massive-MIMO solution, even further improving spectral efficiency, coverage, reliability and other performance measures. They also open up for entirely new services, such as precise localization, environment sensing, and wireless energy transfer. By constructing larger surfaces as a grid of panels, we can activate and deactivate these panels depending on their individual contributions to an overall service-defined performance measure and thereby use as little resources as possible. In this paper, we take initial steps in this direction by analyzing how surfaces built as grids of panels, of which only a fraction are activated, compare. We present three types of results, for an example environment: i) received power gain when allowing dynamic activation over a large surface rather than a single central located panel, ii) the required number of activated antenna elements to reach a minimum received power for different panel sizes, and iii) the locations of activated surface areas.