2020/07/22 by Lili Chen, Wenjun Hu, Chen, Lili +9 · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · #Advanced Antenna and Metasurface Technologies #Advanced Wireless Communication Technologies #Antenna Design and Analysis #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.11503
openalex publication_date 2020/07/22 · openalex created_date 2020/10/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Small, low-cost IoT devices are typically equipped with only a single,\nlow-quality antenna, significantly limiting communication range and link\nquality. In particular, these antennas are typically linearly polarized and\ntherefore susceptible to polarization mismatch, which can easily cause 10-15\ndBm of link loss on communication to and from such devices. In this work, we\nhighlight this under-appreciated issue and propose the augmentation of IoT\ndeployment environments with programmable, RF-sensitive surfaces made of\nmetamaterials. Our smart meta-surface mitigates polarization mismatch by\nrotating the polarization of signals that pass through or reflect off the\nsurface. We integrate our metasurface into an IoT network as LAMA, a Low-power\nLattice of Actuated Metasurface Antennas, designed for the pervasively used 2.4\nGHz ISM band. We optimize LAMA's metasurface design for both low transmission\nloss and low cost, to facilitate deployment at scale. We then build an\nend-to-end system that actuates the metasurface structure to optimize for link\nperformance in real time. Our experimental prototype-based evaluation\ndemonstrates gains in link power of up to 15 dBm, and wireless capacity\nimprovements of 100 and 180 Kbit/s/Hz in through-surface and surface-reflective\nscenarios, respectively, attributable to the polarization rotation properties\nof LAMA'S metasurface.\n