Instructors
Dr George C. Alexandropoulos
Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Dr Christos Liaskos
Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas, Heraklio, Greece and Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Ioannina, Greece
Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz
Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus and School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Registration
£75 Tutorial only | Tutorial + Full Conference access from £145
Full-day Tutorial, Monday 31st August 9:00 (BST)
Further pricing details can be found on the registration page.
Motivation
The increasingly demanding objectives for 6G communications have spurred recent research activities on novel wireless hardware architectures. Among them belong the reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, which are artificial planar structures with integrated electronic circuits that can be programmed to manipulate an incoming ElectroMagnetic (EM) field in a customizable way. Metasurfaces constitute a special class of intelligent surfaces, which are comprised of periodically aligned subwavelength elements, which are capable of offering overall control over the metasurface’s EM behavior. Very recently, there has been keen interest in the adoption of reconfigurable metasurfaces in 6G wireless networks. Their incorporation in wireless networks has been advocated as a revolutionary means to transform any naturally passive wireless propagation environment to an active controllable one.
The late studies in reconfigurable intelligent (meta)surfaces have given birth to the following research directions: i) Modeling of their EM behavior; ii) Efficient signal processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence techniques for the configuration of metasurfaces; iii) Interoperability schemes among reconfigurable metasurfaces and other network nodes (e.g., base stations, access points, relays, user terminals); iv) Networking architectures incorporating programmable environmental objects; and v) Analyses of the network performance gains when reconfigurable metasurfaces are deployed.
This tutorial has the following three core objectives:
- to detail the available hardware designs for reconfigurable intelligent (meta)surfaces intended for beyond 5G wireless networking;
- to present the latest signal processing, machine learning, and AI approaches for their efficient dynamic configuration; and
- to discuss candidate network architectures for metasurfaces-empowered 6G wireless systems.
Structure and content
The full-day tutorial will consist of the following five distinct parts:
- Introduction
- Overview of 5G NR key technologies
- Overview of emerging transceiver hardware architectures
- The vision for programmable wireless environments
- Metasurface Hardware Designs
- Reflectarrays
- Graphene-based metasurfaces
- Plasmonic surfaces
- Liquid crystal metasurfaces
- Prototypes and applications
- Designing metasurfaces versus relays
- Networking Aspects for Metasurface-based Wireless Communications
- Control signaling and tuning protocols
- Software-based EM application programming interfaces
- Software-defined networking integration
- AI orchestration algorithms
- Communication Signal Processing with Metasurfaces
- Modeling unit cell behavior
- Equivalent received signal model
- Channel estimation
- Optimization formulations and algorithms
- Stochastic geometry for gain analysis
- Concluding Remarks and Discussion
