Dynamic Metasurface Antennas for 6G Extreme Massive MIMO Communications

By Nir Shlezinger, George C. Alexandropoulos, M. Imani, Yonina C. Eldar, David R. Smith. IEEE wireless communications, 2020

467 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Next generation wireless base stations and access points will transmit and receive using an extremely massive numbers of antennas. A promising technology for realizing such massive arrays in a dynamically controllable and scalable manner with reduced cost and power consumption utilizes surfaces of radiating metamaterial elements, known as metasurfaces. To date, metasurfaces are mainly considered in the context of wireless communications as passive reflecting devices, aiding conventional transceivers in shaping the propagation environment. This article presents an alternative application of metasurfaces for wireless communications as active reconfigurable antennas with advanced analog signal processing capabilities for next generation transceivers. We review the main characteristics of metasurfaces used for radiation and reception, and analyze their main advantages as well as their capability to reliably communicate in wireless networks. As current studies unveil only a portion of the potential of metasurfaces, we detail a list of exciting research and implementation challenges which arise from the application of metasurface antennas for wireless transceivers.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7080de78b4a43db0b97021b093db08044a3f8731

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Citations in the corpus

A Tutorial on Near-Field XL-MIMO Communications Toward 6G (2023, unknown): “…or reconﬁgurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) [46]–[49], where the active metasurface based XL-MIMO, such as dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA) [50] and reconﬁgurable holographic surface (RHS) [51], [52], possesses the capabilities of transmitting/receiving signals, while the semi-passive…”
Beam Focusing for Near-Field Multi-User MIMO Communications (2021, background): “3) DMA: DMAs utilize radiating metamaterial elements embedded onto the surface of a waveguide to realize reconfigurable antennas of low cost and power consumption [24].”
Communicating With Extremely Large-Scale Array/Surface: Unified Modeling and Performance Analysis (2021, unknown): “, analog combining and compression [38].”
Channel Estimation for RIS-Empowered Multi-User MISO Wireless Communications (2020, background): “This task becomes more complex when the deployed RISs are equipped with large numbers of unit elements having non-linear hardware characteristics [2], [24].”
Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Efficient Holographic MIMO Communications in 6G (2023, unknown): “concept of HMIMO has emerged [25], [26], [27].”
5G-Advanced Toward 6G: Past, Present, and Future (2023, background): “The power allocation, phase shift design, beamforming strategies, channel estimation schemes, and a variety of other aspects regarding reflective RISs have been widely studied in the literature [112], [113], [114], [115], [116].”
The Integrated Sensing and Communication Revolution for 6G: Vision, Techniques, and Applications (2024, unknown): “The exploitation of higher frequency bands, from mil-limeter waves to THz, foreseen in 6G networks and the availability of new antenna technologies for ELAAs opens new opportunities for communication and sensing [231], [233], [234], [235], [236].”
Near-Field Communications: A Tutorial Review (2023, background): “Metasurface antennas are a design approach to approximate CAP antennas and are implemented with metamaterials [11], [12], [68].”
Active Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Wireless Communications (2021, methodology): “The LIS is attached with some RF chains to realize the hybrid A/D beamforming [16] as an efficient realization of”
Holographic MIMO Communications: Theoretical Foundations, Enabling Technologies, and Future Directions (2022, unknown): “With a special focus on the advanced analog signal processing capabilities of HMI-MOS, reference [40] detailed the operations and equivalent signal path models of HMIMOS during transmission and reception.”