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

作者：Marco Di Renzo, Mérouane 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 · 发表于：EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking · 年份：2019 · DOI：10.1186/s13638-019-1438-9 · 被引用次数：1842 · 研究领域：Advanced Wireless Communication Technologies、Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks、Antenna Design and Analysis

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...