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Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Wireless Communications: Principles, Challenges, and Opportunities
Recently there has been a flurry of research on the use of reconfigurable
intelligent surfaces (RIS) in wireless networks to create smart radio
environments. In a smart radio environment, surfaces are capable of
manipulating the propagation of incident electromagnetic waves in a
programmable manner to actively alter the channel realization, which turns the
wireless channel into a controllable system block that can be optimized to
improve overall system performance. In this article, we provide a tutorial
overview of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) for wireless
communications. We describe the working principles of reconfigurable
intelligent surfaces (RIS) and elaborate on different candidate implementations
using metasurfaces and reflectarrays. We discuss the channel models suitable
for both implementations and examine the feasibility of obtaining accurate
channel estimates. Furthermore, we discuss the aspects that differentiate RIS
optimization from precoding for traditional MIMO arrays highlighting both the
arising challenges and the potential opportunities associated with this
emerging technology. Finally, we present numerical results to illustrate the
power of an RIS in shaping the key properties of a MIMO channel.Comment: to appear in the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and
Networking (TCCN
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