Metasurface-assisted massive backscatter wireless communication with commodity Wi-Fi signals

Abstract

Conventional wireless communication architecture, a backbone of our modern society, relies on actively generated carrier signals to transfer information, leading to important challenges including limited spectral resources and energy consumption. Backscatter communication systems, on the other hand, modulate an antenna's impedance to encode information into already existing waves but suffer from low data rates and a lack of information security. Here, we introduce the concept of massive backscatter communication which modulates the propagation environment of stray ambient waves with a programmable metasurface. The metasurface's large aperture and huge number of degrees of freedom enable unprecedented wave control and thereby secure and high-speed information transfer. Our prototype leveraging existing commodity 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi signals achieves data rates on the order of hundreds of Kbps. Our technique is applicable to all types of wave phenomena and provides a fundamentally new perspective on the role of metasurfaces in future wireless communication.

Electromagnetic Model of Reflective Intelligent Surfaces

“…RIS technology is attractive from an energy consumption point of view since it is possible forwarding the incoming signal without employing power amplifiers like in MIMO arrays [9]- [11], but rather by suitably designing the phase shift applied by each reflecting element in order to constructively combine the reflected signal. RIS can be also employed for physical information encoding in the so called massive backscatter wireless communication (MBWC) scheme [12], for simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer (SWIPT), spectrum sharing, Nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) [13]. RIS structures have the advantage of being easily integrable in the communication environment because of the easy deployment into buildings, ceilings of factories or into human clothing [14].…”

Perfect Absorption in a Disordered Medium with Programmable Meta‐Atom Inclusions

“…For instance, Alice can instead communicate with Bob by using a programmable metasurface to focus already existing stray ambient waves on Bob's receiver. [ 37 ] Here, we propose a scheme whereby Alice configures the propagation environment to switch PA on and off at Bob's port. One potential area for deployment is future radiofrequency‐based chip‐to‐chip communication [ 38 ] where the propagation channels are known to be static.…”

Toward localization in terahertz-operating energy harvesting software-defined metamaterials

“…SDMs also find their applications in intelligent wireless environments [21,22]. Although initially SDMs are in this context expected to be static entities (often attached to walls and ceiling of a deployment environment) [23], with the progress in their development they could become entities integrated in e.g., person's clothes, thus the person could become an active participant in the intelligent wireless environments. Introducing a person as an active element could for example benefit the mmWave communication or macro-scale localization capabilities in the intelligent wireless environments.…”