A New Wireless Communication Paradigm through Software-Controlled Metasurfaces

By C. Liaskos, Shuai Nie, A. Tsioliaridou, Andreas Pitsillides, S. Ioannidis, Ian F. Akyildiz. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2018

1,126 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Electromagnetic waves undergo multiple uncontrollable alterations as they propagate within a wireless environment. Free space path loss, signal absorption, as well as reflections, refractions, and diffractions caused by physical objects within the environment highly affect the performance of wireless communications. Currently, such effects are intractable to account for and are treated as probabilistic factors. This article proposes a radically different approach, enabling deterministic, programmable control over the behavior of wireless environments. The key enabler is the so-called HyperSurface tile, a novel class of planar meta-materials that can interact with impinging electromagnetic waves in a controlled manner. The HyperSurface tiles can effectively re-engineer electromagnetic waves, including steering toward any desired direction, full absorption, polarization manipulation, and more. Multiple tiles are employed to coat objects such as walls, furniture, and overall, any objects in indoor and outdoor environments. An external software service calculates and deploys the optimal interaction types per tile to best fit the needs of communicating devices. Evaluation via simulations highlights the potential of the new concept.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/62147b2b4a87556630f820dca35e4ce7df0a1a19

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Citations in the corpus

Security and Privacy for 6G: A Survey on Prospective Technologies and Challenges (2021, background): “holographic spatial space can cause more concerns of being interfered with or wiretapped [122].”
An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Terahertz Communications (2020, background): “The concept of HyperSurfaces, further, is proposed in [297] for THz communications.”
Secrecy Rate Maximization for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Multi-Antenna Communications (2019, methodology): “IRS can be implemented via conventional reﬂectarrays [1]–[3], liquid crystal metasurfaces [4], or software deﬁned metamaterials [5].”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Millimeter Wave Communications: Joint Active and Passive Precoding Design (2019, methodology): “Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been recently proposed as a promising new technology for realizing a smart and programmable wireless propagation environment via software-controlled reflection [11], [12].”
Robust and Secure Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (2019, neutral): “amplify-and-forward relays [19].”
Communication Through a Large Reflecting Surface With Phase Errors (2019, background): “The latter have particularly attractive properties and are expected to be a key enabler of smart wireless environments [2], [3].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Assisted Multiuser MISO Systems Exploiting Deep Reinforcement Learning (2020, methodology): “, as well as ready integration into existing communication systems with minor modifications on hardware [10]-[14].”
Cascaded Channel Estimation for Large Intelligent Metasurface Assisted Massive MIMO (2019, background): “, s[T ]] ∈ CN×T , and X [x [1], .”
Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces: Physics, Propagation, and Pathloss Modeling (2019, background): “This can potentially be achieved by deploying special surfaces, known as intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) [1], software-controlled metasurfaces [2]–[4], and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces [5], [6], that can control how the waves that reach them are reflected.”
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Multi-Hop RIS-Empowered Terahertz Communications: A DRL-Based Hybrid Beamforming Design (2021, background): “One of the major challenges is the very high propagation attenuations, which drastically reduces the propagation distance [1], [2], [4]–[8].”
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”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead (2020, background): “papers on the application of RISs to the design of wireless networks have been published [26]–[28], [45]–[55].”