The concept of Smart Cities has been introduced as a way to benefit from the
digitization of various ecosystems at a city level. To support this concept,
future communication networks need to be carefully designed with respect to the
city infrastructure and utilization of resources. Recently, the idea of 'smart'
environment, which takes advantage of the infrastructure for better performance
of wireless networks, has been proposed. This idea is aligned with the recent
advances in design of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which are
planar structures with the capability to reflect impinging electromagnetic
waves toward preferred directions. Thus, RISs are expected to provide the
necessary flexibility for the design of the 'smart' communication environment,
which can be optimally shaped to enable cost- and energy-efficient signal
transmissions where needed. Upon deployment of RISs, the ecosystem of the Smart
Cities would become even more controllable and adaptable, which would
subsequently ease the implementation of future communication networks in urban
areas and boost the interconnection among private households and public
services. In this paper, we describe our vision of the application of RISs in
future Smart Cities. In particular, the research challenges and opportunities
are addressed. The contribution paves the road to a systematic design of
RIS-assisted communication networks for Smart Cities in the years to come.Comment: Submitted for possible publication in IEEE Open Journal of the
Communications Societ