Reliable and Long-Term Service Enhancement via Robotic Aerial IRS in 6G Wireless Networks

Abstract:
Unmanned-aerial-vehicle (UAV) platforms fitted with intelligent reflecting surfaces (U-IRSs) can generate on-demand virtual line-of-sight (LoS) links, but their endurance is severely constrained by the continuous hover power-typically several hundred watts-needed to remain airborne. To mitigate this issue we propose the robotic aerial IRS (RA-IRS), a U-IRS augmented with a force-closure gripper that allows the entire assembly to anchor temporarily to ubiquitous street infrastructure, eliminating hover power and greatly reducing instability. We describe an integrated electro-mechanical architecture that combines a lightweight discrete-coding metasurface, a compact gripping mechanism and a rotary-wing UAV, and we derive massand- energy budgets for each subsystem using data from several state-of-the-art metasurface prototypes. A worst-case wind-load analysis shows that only modest clamp forces are required for typical urban gusts, while numerical evaluations across representative 5G and emerging 6G frequency ranges demonstrate that an anchored RA-IRS can deliver the same link-budget gains as a hovering U-IRS yet consumes only a few percent of the energy over half-day timescales. These results indicate that anchored RAIRSs provide a practical, energy-efficient and rapidly deployable solution for long-duration coverage enhancement in future 6G urban networks.