2018/06/04 by Christos Liaskos, Liaskos, Christos, Shuai Nie +9 · 10 citations
Engineering · Materials Science · #Antenna Design and Analysis #Advanced Antenna and Metasurface Technologies #Metamaterials and Metasurfaces Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1806.01792
Electromagnetic waves undergo multiple uncontrollable alterations as they\npropagate within a wireless environment. Free space path loss, signal\nabsorption, as well as reflections, refractions and diffractions caused by\nphysical objects within the environment highly affect the performance of\nwireless communications. Currently, such effects are intractable to account for\nand are treated as probabilistic factors. The paper proposes a radically\ndifferent approach, enabling deterministic, programmable control over the\nbehavior of the wireless environments. The key-enabler is the so-called\nHyperSurface tile, a novel class of planar meta-materials which can interact\nwith impinging electromagnetic waves in a controlled manner. The HyperSurface\ntiles can effectively re-engineer electromagnetic waves, including steering\ntowards any desired direction, full absorption, polarization manipulation and\nmore. Multiple tiles are employed to coat objects such as walls, furniture,\noverall, any objects in the indoor and outdoor environments. An external\nsoftware service calculates and deploys the optimal interaction types per tile,\nto best fit the needs of communicating devices. Evaluation via simulations\nhighlights the potential of the new concept.\n