A New Wireless Communication Paradigm through Software-Controlled Metasurfaces

Abstract

Electromagnetic waves undergo multiple uncontrollable alterations as they propagate within a wireless environment. Free space path loss, signal absorption, as well as reflections, refractions and diffractions caused by physical objects within the environment highly affect the performance of wireless communications. Currently, such effects are intractable to account for and are treated as probabilistic factors. The paper proposes a radically different approach, enabling deterministic, programmable control over the behavior of the wireless environments. The key-enabler is the so-called HyperSurface tile, a novel class of planar meta-materials which can interact with impinging electromagnetic waves in a controlled manner. The HyperSurface tiles can effectively re-engineer electromagnetic waves, including steering towards any desired direction, full absorption, polarization manipulation and more. Multiple tiles are employed to coat objects such as walls, furniture, overall, any objects in the indoor and outdoor environments. An external software service calculates and deploys the optimal interaction types per tile, to best fit the needs of communicating devices. Evaluation via simulations highlights the potential of the new concept.

Sum Rate Optimization for Two Way Communications With Intelligent Reflecting Surface

“…Here we adopt the Arimoto-Blahut structure [14]. Before the derivation, we introduce the following lemma [16, Lemma 10.8.1, p. 333]: 1 Note that S i is aware of its own data symbol s i and precoder F i .…”

Enabling Secure Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces

“…Because of their ability to control the propagation directions of electromagnetic (EM) waves, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have been recently introduced in wireless communication systems [3]. One of the advantages of deploying IRSs in wireless systems is that they are typically composed of low-cost passive devices, e.g., phase shifters and dipoles [4]. Moreover, the artificial thin films of IRSs can be readily implemented on the facades of infrastructures.…”

Using Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces for Rank Improvement in MIMO Communications

“…The metasurface technology has recently gained interest in wireless communications, under names such as IRS [7], large intelligent surface [8], and software-controlled metasurfaces [9,10]. Several promising use cases of this technology, such as for range extension to users with obstructed direct links [7,8,11,12], joint wireless information and power transmission in internet of things (IoT) networks [13], physical layer security [14,15], unmanned air vehicle (UAV) communications [16] have been studied.…”