Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How it Works, State of Research, and Road Ahead

By M. Di Renzo, Alessio Zappone, Merouane Debbah, Mohamed-Slim Alouini, Chau Yuen, J. de Rosny, Sergei A. Tretyakov. arXiv.org, 2020

2,293 citations recorded by the source corpus.

What is a reconfigurable intelligent surface? What is a smart radio environment? What is a metasurface? How do metasurfaces work and how to model them? How to reconcile the mathematical theories of communication and electromagnetism? What are the most suitable uses and applications of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces in wireless networks? What are the most promising smart radio environments for wireless applications? What is the current state of research? What are the most important and challenging research issues to tackle? These are a few of the many questions that we investigate in this short opus, which has the threefold objective of introducing the emerging research field of smart radio environments empowered by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, putting forth the need of reconciling and reuniting C. E. Shannon's mathematical theory of communication with G. Green's and J. C. Maxwell's mathematical theories of electromagnetism, and reporting pragmatic guidelines and recipes for employing appropriate physics-based models of metasurfaces in wireless communications.

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Citations in the corpus

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces vs. Relaying: Differences, Similarities, and Performance Comparison (2019, background): “On the other hand, the average end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio of an RIS made of N individually tunable antennas (or N reconfigurable metasurfaces that operate as anomalous reflectors, each of them made of an appropriate number of meta-atoms to realize the desired wave transformations) increases, i”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for 6G Systems: Principles, Applications, and Research Directions (2021, unknown): “Hence, compared to conventional active transmitters, RISs can operate with much lower cost in terms of hardware and power consumption [2], [6].”
Simultaneously Transmitting And Reflecting (STAR) RIS Aided Wireless Communications (2021, background): “Therefore, RIS can facilitate “Smart Radio Environments (SREs)” [6].”
A Tutorial on Environment-Aware Communications via Channel Knowledge Map for 6G (2023, background): “However, as IRS does not have the signal processing capability due to the lack of signal processing components, it cannot perform the conventional channel training.”
5G-Advanced Toward 6G: Past, Present, and Future (2023, background): “…speaking, RIS is an umbrella term for two-dimensional arrays, usually based on metamaterial or classical antennas with fast electronic switching, that can manipulate electromagnetic waves via anomalous reflection, refraction, polarization transformation, among other functionalities [110], [111].”
Active RIS Versus Passive RIS: Which is Superior With the Same Power Budget? (2021, background): “Passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided systems have attracted extensive research attention recently [1]– [5].”
Active Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Wireless Communications (2021, methodology): “The passive RIS power consumption is mainly due to the switch and control circuit at the RE [4], [7].”
Edge Artificial Intelligence for 6G: Vision, Enabling Technologies, and Applications (2021, background): “[46], [47] and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) [48], [49]) to support fast exchange for high-dimensional model updates, and next-generation network architectures (e.”
An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Terahertz Communications (2020, background): “One of the recent hot research topics in wireless communications is creating an intelligent, programmable environment for communication [385].”
A Survey on Millimeter-Wave Beamforming Enabled UAV Communications and Networking (2021, background): “Furthermore, the deployment of IRSs also has a great potential for enhancing communication security [344].”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial (2020, background): “[35] Provide a comprehensive overview of RIS applications, technological advantages, state-of-the-art research and future research directions.”
Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond (2021, background): “Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), also known as intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) and large intelligent surface (LIS), is a new type of passive metamaterial device consisting of a large number of reflecting elements whose reflecting amplitudes and phases can be independently controlled to”
What Will the Future of UAV Cellular Communications Be? A Flight From 5G to 6G (2021, background): “An RIS can realize sophisticated and exotic signal transformations, which include anomalous refractions, polarization conversion, collimation, and focusing [115].”
Power Scaling Laws and Near-Field Behaviors of Massive MIMO and Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (2020, background): “The concept of realtime controllable metasurfaces has recently received much attention in the communications society and is called intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) [15], [16], software-controlled metasurface [17], [18], and reconfigurable intelligent surface [19]–[21].”