Chicago Section

The advent of the connected things paradigm in 5G enabled various sophisticated applications, whose evolution paves the way for the notion of the connected intelligence of everything in the future 6G networks. Recent speculations for this upcoming new generation push the 5G performance indicators to unprecedented levels, envisioning THz frequency bands, devices with embedded sensing capabilities, and native artificial intelligence. In this talk, we will discuss the emerging technology of simultaneously reflecting and sensing Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs), which is provisioned as an efficient enabler of smart wireless environments, offering a highly scalable, low-cost, and hardware-efficient solution for wave propagation control. We will present an efficient hardware design for such hybrid metasurfaces and elaborate on their utilization for explicit and parametric channel estimation as well as for localization. Their potential for self-optimization, which will severely reduce control signaling, will be highlighted together with relevant open research challenges and promising applications.  

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