Metasurfaces and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces in Wireless Communications Applications

Dear Colleagues,

To cope with the increasing demand for higher data rates and broader bandwidths, researchers are now moving towards using shorter wavelengths for wireless communications applications. Nevertheless, it is well-known that the propagation attenuation and blockage increase with the frequency, thus challenging the latter approach. The use of metasurfaces and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) (also known as reconfigurable metasurfaces) has recently emerged as a promising alternative to overcome these drawbacks. Indeed, these metasurfaces are now considered to be the basis for future wireless telecommunications systems, in which the environment contributes to the transmission and steering of signals. Moreover, recent studies have demonstrated that these artificial structures are crucial to improving the energy and spectral efficiency of future wireless communication systems.

On the other hand, technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have been identified as pivotal enablers for the intelligence expected to be a part of the next generation of wireless networks. This way, RIS-aided systems will hugely benefit from these technologies because they can be used in tasks such as the control, optimization, and configuration of these systems. The aim is to alleviate the computational complexity involved in those tasks, moving towards a self-adaptive and autonomous network.

Therefore, this Special Issue was conceived to provide an outlet for authors to share their research findings on the advances of metasurfaces and RIS-aided wireless communications systems, in addition to acting as a motivation to accelerate and boost the development of such structures for the next-generation of wireless networks, such as beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G. The submission of original research contributions (with new experimental results and/or computational-derived insights) and review papers (providing readers with new perspectives and/or challenges for future developments) are welcome.

The relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Overviews and surveys of the state of the art and future research directions on RISs.
• Novel meta-atom and array designs and implementations.
• RIS-aided communication networks, system models, and waveform designs.
• Channel and propagation modeling for RIS-aided communications.
• Performance analysis for RIS-aided communications systems.
• Development of testbeds and experimental measurements of RIS-aided communications.
• RIS for wireless power transfer and wireless energy harvesting.
• AI and ML algorithms for RIS.
• Realistic environment measurement of RIS-based wireless communication systems.
• Channel estimation approaches for RIS-aided systems.
• Beamforming for RIS communications.
• Resource allocation and interference management in RIS-aided communications.
• RIS-aided transceiver designs.
• RIS-aided mmWave/THz/visible light communications.
• RIS-aided physical layer security solutions.
• RIS-aided vehicle communications.
• RIS-aided satellite communications.

Dr. Jorge Ricardo Mejía-Salazar
Dr. Rausley Adriano Amaral de Souza
Dr. Felipe Augusto Pereira de Figueiredo
Guest Editors

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• reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
• intelligent surfaces
• intelligent reflecting surfaces, metasurfaces
• artificial intelligence
• 6G and beyond wireless communications
• channel estimation
• channel and propagation modeling
• experimental results