Smart radio environments empowered by reconfigurable AI meta-surfaces: an idea whose time has come
Marco Di Renzo,Merouane Debbah,Dinh-Thuy Phan-Huy,Alessio Zappone,Mohamed-Slim Alouini,Chau Yuen,Vincenzo Sciancalepore,George C. Alexandropoulos,Jakob Hoydis,Haris Gacanin,Julien de Rosny,Ahcène Bounceur,Geoffroy Lerosey,Mathias Fink +13 more
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
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.Abstract:
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.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial
TL;DR: This paper provides a tutorial overview of IRS-aided wireless communications, and elaborate its reflection and channel models, hardware architecture and practical constraints, as well as various appealing applications in wireless networks.
Journal ArticleDOI
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead
Marco Di Renzo,Alessio Zappone,Merouane Debbah,Mohamed-Slim Alouini,Chau Yuen,Julien de Rosny,Sergei A. Tretyakov +6 more
TL;DR: Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can be realized in different ways, which include (i) large arrays of inexpensive antennas that are usually spaced half of the wavelength apart; and (ii) metamaterial-based planar or conformal large surfaces whose scattering elements have sizes and inter-distances much smaller than the wavelength.
Journal ArticleDOI
Holographic MIMO Surfaces for 6G Wireless Networks: Opportunities, Challenges, and Trends
Chongwen Huang,Sha Hu,George C. Alexandropoulos,Alessio Zappone,Chau Yuen,Rui Zhang,Marco Di Renzo,Merouane Debbah +7 more
TL;DR: An overview of HMIMOS communications including the available hardware architectures for reconfiguring such surfaces are provided, and the opportunities and key challenges in designingHMIMOS-enabled wireless communications are highlighted.
Journal ArticleDOI
Beamforming Optimization for Wireless Network Aided by Intelligent Reflecting Surface With Discrete Phase Shifts
Qingqing Wu,Rui Zhang +1 more
TL;DR: Analytically show that as compared to the ideal case with continuous phase shifts, the IRS with discrete phase shifts achieves the same squared power gain in terms of asymptotically large number of reflecting elements, while a constant proportional power loss is incurred that depends only on the number of phase-shift levels.
Journal ArticleDOI
Multicell MIMO Communications Relying on Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces
TL;DR: This paper proposes to invoke an IRS at the cell boundary of multiple cells to assist the downlink transmission to cell-edge users, whilst mitigating the inter-cell interference, which is a crucial issue in multicell communication systems.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
A mathematical theory of communication
TL;DR: This final installment of the paper considers the case where the signals or the messages or both are continuously variable, in contrast with the discrete nature assumed until now.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Survey on Transfer Learning
Sinno Jialin Pan,Qiang Yang +1 more
TL;DR: The relationship between transfer learning and other related machine learning techniques such as domain adaptation, multitask learning and sample selection bias, as well as covariate shift are discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Controlling Electromagnetic Fields
TL;DR: This work shows how electromagnetic fields can be redirected at will and proposes a design strategy that has relevance to exotic lens design and to the cloaking of objects from electromagnetic fields.
Journal ArticleDOI
Light Propagation with Phase Discontinuities: Generalized Laws of Reflection and Refraction
Nanfang Yu,Patrice Genevet,Patrice Genevet,Mikhail A. Kats,Francesco Aieta,Francesco Aieta,Jean-Philippe Tetienne,Jean-Philippe Tetienne,Federico Capasso,Zeno Gaburro,Zeno Gaburro +10 more
TL;DR: In this article, a two-dimensional array of optical resonators with spatially varying phase response and subwavelength separation can imprint phase discontinuities on propagating light as it traverses the interface between two media.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Tractable Approach to Coverage and Rate in Cellular Networks
TL;DR: The proposed model is pessimistic (a lower bound on coverage) whereas the grid model is optimistic, and that both are about equally accurate, and the proposed model may better capture the increasingly opportunistic and dense placement of base stations in future networks.
Related Papers (5)
Intelligent Reflecting Surface Enhanced Wireless Network via Joint Active and Passive Beamforming
Qingqing Wu,Rui Zhang +1 more
Towards Smart and Reconfigurable Environment: Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Network
Qingqing Wu,Rui Zhang +1 more