The design of a smart electromagnetic (EM) environment for next-generation wireless communication systems is addressed in this work. The proposed approach aims at synthesizing a desired EM field distribution over a target region, where the receiving terminals are located, through the opportunistic exploitation of the complex scattering interactions between the EM field generated by a reconfigurable primary source and the objects/scatterers present in the environment, which behave as application-driven passive metastructures. The effectiveness and the potentialities of the proposed design methodology are assessed with a proof-of-concept numerical result obtained by means of advanced and reliable simulation tools.

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With the advance of the Internet of things (IoT), localization is essential in varied services. In urban scenarios, multiple transmitters localization is faced with challenges such as nonline-of-sight (NLOS) propagation and limited deployment of sensors. To this end, this paper proposes the MT-GCNN (Multi-Task Gated Convolutional Neural Network), a novel multiple transmitters localization scheme based on deep multi-task learning, to learn the NLOS propagation features and achieve the localization. The multi-task learning network decomposes the problem into a coarse localization task and a fine correction task. In particular, the MT-GCNN uses an improved gated convolution module to extract features from sparse sensing data more effectively. In the training stage, a joint loss function is proposed to optimize the two branches of tasks. In the testing stage, the well-trained MT-GCNN model predicts the classified grids and corresponding biases jointly to improve the overall performance of localization. In the urban scenarios challenged by NLOS propagation and sparse deployment of sensors, numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed MT-GCNN framework has more accurate and robust performance than other algorithms.

There is a growing demand for localization of illegal signal sources, aiming to guarantee the security of urban electromagnetic environment. The performance of traditional localization methods is limited due to the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation and sparse layouts of sensors. In this paper, a deep learning-based localization method is proposed to overcome these issues in urban scenarios. Firstly, a model of electromagnetic wave propagation considered with geographic information is proposed to prepare reliable datasets for intelligent cognition of urban electromagnetic environment. Then, this paper improves an hourglass neural network which consists of downsampling and upsampling layers to learn the propagation features from sensing data. The core modules of VGG and ResNet are, respectively, utilized as feature extractors in downsampling. Moreover, this paper proposes a weighted loss function to expand the attention on position features, in order to improve the performance of localization with sparse layouts of sensors. Representative numerical results are discussed to assess the proposed method. ResNet-based extractor performs more efficiently than VGG-based extractor, and the proposed weighted loss function increases the localization accuracy by more than 50%. Additionally, the established geographic model supports qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the robustness with varied degree of NLOS propagation. Compared with other deep learning-based algorithms, the proposed method presents the more robust and superior performance under severe NLOS propagation and sparse sensing conditions.