Radio Localization and Mapping With Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Challenges, Opportunities, and Research Directions

By Henk Wymeersch, Jiguang He, B. Denis, Antonio Clemente, Markku J. Juntti. IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine, 2019

318 citations recorded by the source corpus.

5G radio for millimeter-wave (mm-wave) and beyond5G concepts at 0.1-1 THz can exploit angle and delay measurements for localization through an increased bandwidth and large antenna arrays, but they are limited in terms of blockage caused by obstacles. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are seen as a transformative technology that can control the physical propagation environment in which they are embedded by passively reflecting radio waves in preferred directions and actively sensing this environment in receive and transmit modes. While such RISs have mainly been intended for communication purposes, they can provide great benefits in terms of performance, energy consumption, and cost for localization and mapping. These benefits as well as associated challenges are the main topics of this article.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/800d4e32302876393d4fd4bfa588ed61d400c2dd

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Citations in the corpus

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: A signal processing perspective with wireless applications (2021, unknown): “It is meant as a complement to recent surveys of electromagnetic and hardware aspects [4], [7], [11], acoustics [12], communication theory [13], and localization [8].”
5G-Advanced Toward 6G: Past, Present, and Future (2023, background): “Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) that reflect radio waves in preferred directions can also be exploited for localization and mapping [82].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Localization: Position and Orientation Error Bounds (2020, background): “In analogy with software deﬁned radios, RISs are often referred to as software deﬁned surfaces (SDSs), where the electromagnet response to the incident wave can be controlled by a software [7].”
A Survey on Channel Estimation and Practical Passive Beamforming Design for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Communications (2021, background): “system models/designs [13], [18], [19], [21]–[23], applications [14], [19], [24], [25], hardware implementations [15], [26]–[28], functionalities [13], [28], [29], and performance analysis [24], [30], which are summarized in Table II for the ease of reference.”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial (2020, background): “[194], IRS-aided sensing and localization [195]–[197], IRSaided THz communication [198]–[200], IRS-based spatial modulation for data communication [201]–[204], etc.”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [283], the authors analyze and discuss the fundamental technical and scientific challenges for the successful use of RISs for the localization of users and for creating maps of the coverage area in millimeter-wave wireless networks.”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How it Works, State of Research, and Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [281], the authors analyze and discuss the fundamental technical and scientific challenges for the successful use of RISs for the localization of users and for creating maps of the coverage area in millimeter-wave wireless networks.”