Smart radio environments empowered by reconfigurable AI meta-surfaces: an idea whose time has come

By M. Di Renzo, Merouane Debbah, Dinh-Thuy Phan-Huy, Alessio Zappone, Mohamed-Slim Alouini, Chau Yuen, Vincenzo Sciancalepore, George C. Alexandropoulos, Jakob Hoydis, Haris Gacanin and 4 more. EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, 2019

1,115 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Future wireless networks are expected to constitute a distributed intelligent wireless communications, sensing, and computing platform, which will have the challenging requirement of interconnecting the physical and digital worlds in a seamless and sustainable manner. Currently, two main factors prevent wireless network operators from building such networks: (1) the lack of control of the wireless environment, whose impact on the radio waves cannot be customized, and (2) the current operation of wireless radios, which consume a lot of power because new signals are generated whenever data has to be transmitted. In this paper, we challenge the usual “more data needs more power and emission of radio waves” status quo, and motivate that future wireless networks necessitate a smart radio environment: a transformative wireless concept, where the environmental objects are coated with artificial thin films of electromagnetic and reconfigurable material (that are referred to as reconfigurable intelligent meta-surfaces), which are capable of sensing the environment and of applying customized transformations to the radio waves. Smart radio environments have the potential to provide future wireless networks with uninterrupted wireless connectivity, and with the capability of transmitting data without generating new signals but recycling existing radio waves. We will discuss, in particular, two major types of reconfigurable intelligent meta-surfaces applied to wireless networks. The first type of meta-surfaces will be embedded into, e.g., walls, and will be directly controlled by the wireless network operators via a software controller in order to shape the radio waves for, e.g., improving the network coverage. The second type of meta-surfaces will be embedded into objects, e.g., smart t-shirts with sensors for health monitoring, and will backscatter the radio waves generated by cellular base stations in order to report their sensed data to mobile phones. These functionalities will enable wireless network operators to offer new services without the emission of additional radio waves, but by recycling those already existing for other purposes. This paper overviews the current research efforts on smart radio environments, the enabling technologies to realize them in practice, the need of new communication-theoretic models for their analysis and design, and the long-term and open research issues to be solved towards their massive deployment. In a nutshell, this paper is focused on discussing how the availability of reconfigurable intelligent meta-surfaces will allow wireless network operators to redesign common and well-known network communication paradigms.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computer Networks and Communications, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa3c0f3c0dc834d65cef14105e3f8070cef20dd9

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Citations in the corpus

Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial (2020, background): “[9], [17]–[19], [31]–[38], which are summarized in Table II for ease of reference.”
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 [8].”
Active Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Wireless Communications (2021, background): “With the proper design of the reflecting coefficients at each RE, RIS is able to enhance the signal reception at the desired destinations and/or suppress the interference to unintended users [4], [5], thereby artificially creating a favorable propagation condition and enhancing the existing wireless”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces vs. Relaying: Differences, Similarities, and Performance Comparison (2019, background): “A metasurface is a sub-wavelength array formed by sub-wavelength metallic or dielectric scattering particles that are referred to as meta-atoms or unit-cells [4]–[6].”
Sionna: An Open-Source Library for Next-Generation Physical Layer Research (2022, background): “…and satellite communication [6], machine learning (ML)-based air interface design [7], semantic communication [8], reconﬁgurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) [9], sensing and localization [10], digital twins [11], computer vision for wireless [12], as well as federated learning over wireless [13].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Wireless Communications: Principles, Challenges, and Opportunities (2020, background): “In envisioned RIS deployments [1], where an RIS covers large sections of buildings’ facades outdoors and walls indoors, it is safe to assume that the transceivers of interest would be in the near-field of the RIS [30], especially in dense networks.”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead (2020, background): “Electromagnetic-based routing in smart radio environments (reproduced from [47]).”
Exploiting Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces in NOMA Networks: Joint Beamforming Optimization (2019, background): “RECENTLY, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided transmission has drawn significant attention due to its superior performance in enhancing spectrum efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) for wireless communication networks [2], [3].”
A Simple Design of IRS-NOMA Transmission (2019, methodology): “Motivated by this difficulty, this letter is to propose a new type of NOMA transmission by employing the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) which can be viewed as a low-cost antenna array consisting of a large number of reconfigurable reflecting elements [6]–[11].”
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Prospective Multiple Antenna Technologies for Beyond 5G (2019, background): “5) Identifying a “Killer Application”: There is a series of survey papers that speculate on how an IRS can be used in future networks [14], [15], [166], [167], but there is a need to demonstrate a “killer application” or a metric for which IRS-aided transmission makes a paradigm shift in…”
A Vision and Framework for the High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) Networks of the Future (2020, background): “…Channel/Sub-channel Allocation and Spectrum Sharing [164-174] Mobility and Power Control [156], [160-161] Power Control for Multicast Services [95],[98],[106-108] Joint Radio and Computational Power Management [163] Joint Power, Sub-channel and Time Allocation [168-170] Spectrum Management and…”
Hybrid Beamforming for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface based Multi-User Communications: Achievable Rates With Limited Discrete Phase Shifts (2019, background): “can be tuned by the RIS controller via multiple PIN diodes (ON/OFF) [5].”