Wireless Communications Through Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

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The future of mobile communications looks exciting with the potential new use cases and challenging requirements of future 6th generation (6G) and beyond wireless networks.

• Since the beginning of the modern era of wireless communications, the propagation medium has been perceived as a randomly behaving entity between the transmitter and the receiver, which degrades the quality of the received signal due to the uncontrollable interactions of the transmitted radio waves with the surrounding objects.
• The recent advent of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces in wireless communications enables, on the other hand, network operators to control the scattering, reflection, and refraction characteristics of the radio waves, by overcoming the negative effects of natural wireless propagation.
• Recent results have revealed that reconfigurable intelligent surfaces can effectively control the wavefront, e.g., the phase, amplitude, frequency, and even polarization, of the impinging signals without the need of complex decoding, encoding, and radio frequency processing operations.