Reconfigurable-Intelligent-Surface Empowered Wireless Communications: Challenges and Opportunities

Understand

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are regarded as a promising emerging hardware technology to improve the spectrum and energy efficiency of wireless networks by artificially reconfiguring the propagation environment of electromagnetic waves.

• Due to the unique advantages in enhancing wireless channel capacity, RISs have recently become a hot research topic.
• In this article, we focus on three fundamental physical-layer challenges for the incorporation of RISs into wireless networks, namely, channel state information acquisition, passive information transfer, and low-complexity robust system design.
• We summarize the state-of-the-art solutions and explore potential research directions.