Wireless Communications Through Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

By Ertugrul Basar, M. Di Renzo, J. de Rosny, Merouane Debbah, Mohamed-Slim Alouini, Rui Zhang. IEEE Access, 2019

2,987 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The future of mobile communications looks exciting with the potential new use cases and challenging requirements of future 6th generation (6G) and beyond wireless networks. Since the beginning of the modern era of wireless communications, the propagation medium has been perceived as a randomly behaving entity between the transmitter and the receiver, which degrades the quality of the received signal due to the uncontrollable interactions of the transmitted radio waves with the surrounding objects. The recent advent of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces in wireless communications enables, on the other hand, network operators to control the scattering, reflection, and refraction characteristics of the radio waves, by overcoming the negative effects of natural wireless propagation. Recent results have revealed that reconfigurable intelligent surfaces can effectively control the wavefront, e.g., the phase, amplitude, frequency, and even polarization, of the impinging signals without the need of complex decoding, encoding, and radio frequency processing operations. Motivated by the potential of this emerging technology, the present article is aimed to provide the readers with a detailed overview and historical perspective on state-of-the-art solutions, and to elaborate on the fundamental differences with other technologies, the most important open research issues to tackle, and the reasons why the use of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces necessitates to rethink the communication-theoretic models currently employed in wireless networks. This article also explores theoretical performance limits of reconfigurable intelligent surface-assisted communication systems using mathematical techniques and elaborates on the potential use cases of intelligent surfaces in 6G and beyond wireless networks.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10d0b9f8f921125543e872da39ded4ab1e75f088

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces vs. Relaying: Differences, Similarities, and Performance Comparison (2019, background): “If they are nearly passive, in addition, they cannot amplify or regenerate the signals [5].”
Double-IRS Assisted Multi-User MIMO: Cooperative Passive Beamforming Design (2020, background): “AS a promising technology for achieving smart and reconfigurable wireless communication environment costeffectively, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has recently received rapidly increasing attention from both academic and industry communities [1]–[4].”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial (2020, background): “It is worth noting that there have been other terminologies similar to IRS named in the literature, such as intelligent wall [15], smart reflectarray [16], and reconfigurable metasurface/intelligent surface (RIS) [17], [18], large intelligent surface/antennas (LISA) [19], RFocus [20], among others, ”
Channel Estimation for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Multiuser Communications: Framework, Algorithms, and Analysis (2019, background): “Thanks to the IRS controller, each element on IRS is able to dynamically adjust its reflection coefficient for rescattering the electromagnetic waves from the users to the BS such that the useful signal and harmful interference can be added at the BS in constructive and destructive manners, respecti”
Federated Learning for 6G: Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities (2021, background): “Reconﬁgurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted wireless communication has been proposed as a potential solution for enhancing the energy efﬁciency of wireless networks [27]–[38].”
Weighted Sum-Rate Maximization for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided Wireless Networks (2019, background): “RECONFIGURABLE intelligent surface (RIS), also known as intelligent reflection surface, is an artificial structure consisting of passive radio elements, each of which could adjust the reflection of the incident electromagnetic waves with unnatural properties [1]–[7].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Localization: Position and Orientation Error Bounds (2020, methodology): “In analogy with software defined radios, RISs are often referred to as software defined surfaces (SDSs), where the electromagnetic response to the incident wave can be controlled by a software [8].”
Two-Timescale Channel Estimation for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided Wireless Communications (2019, background): “Different from conventional wireless communications where the propagation environment between the base station (BS) and the user equipment (UE) is considered uncontrollable, the RIS enables us to manipulate the wireless propagation environment by controlling the reflection coefficients on all RIS el”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [48], the applications of RISs as anomalous”
Grant-Free Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for IoT: A Survey (2019, background): “4) Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS, [237]), also known as large intelligent metasurfaces (LIM, [238]) and intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS, [239]), have been considered as a potential technology for improving the energy and spectral efficiencies of w”
6G Wireless Communication Systems: Applications, Requirements, Technologies, Challenges, and Research Directions (2019, background): “[52] The theoretical performance limits of reconfigurable intelligent surface-assisted communication systems on the potential use cases of intelligent surfaces in 6G wireless networks is presented.”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Three Myths and Two Critical Questions (2020, methodology): “an anomalous mirror if it has a width and length larger than ten wavelengths [8].”
Radio Localization and Mapping With Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Challenges, Opportunities, and Research Directions (2019, background): “RISs represent a breakthrough technology whereby surfaces are endowed with the capability to actively modify the impinging EM wave [2], as visualized in Figure 1.”
What should 6G be? (2019, background): “have defined and justified the conception of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, which are designed to sense the wireless environment and apply customised transformations to the radio waves in an adaptive manner [30], [70].”
Joint Active and Passive Beamforming Optimization for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted SWIPT Under QoS Constraints (2019, background): “All these compelling advantages have spurred a great deal of interest recently in investigating and building IRS or its various equivalents [7], [8].”