Cancelled

T13: Wireless Communications in the Wave Domain:  Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface, Holographic MIMO, and the like

Organizer: Marco Di Renzo, CentraleSupelec, Paris-Saclay University, France

Abstract: In wireless communications, we have been recently assisting to the upsurge in brand-new technologies for the physical layer, which rely on encoding and processing information in the wave domain, i.e., at the electromagnetic level. This emerging trend has been facilitated by recent and promising advances in the field of configurable antennas, and, especially, metamaterials, and metasurfaces, which are engineered materials that can process the electromagnetic waves in the wave domain without the need of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversions.

Notable examples of these emerging technologies include (i) spatial (SM), index (IM), media-based, and meta surface-based modulation, which encode information onto the physical characteristics of antennas and meta surfaces; (ii) reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), which improve the transmission of data by appropriately shaping the propagation of electromagnetic waves in the wave domain, tuning radio propagation environments into smart radio propagation environments; (iii) holographic surfaces (HoloS), which are continuous-aperture hybrid multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, where the encoding and decoding of data is performed in the wave domain; and (iv) stacked intelligent surfaces (SIM), which are multi-layer meta surface-based devices resembling deep neural networks, where the encoding and encoding of data is realized through iterative signal processing operations in the wave domain.

This tutorial is aimed at (i) introducing the benefits of wireless communications in the wave domain; (ii) presenting the key emerging technologies in this context; (iii) overviewing the state-of-the-art electromagnetically consistent communication models for wave domain communications; (iv) summarizing the most recent signal processing algorithms for optimization; and (v) reporting the most recent experimental and standardization activities in this new field of research.

Organizer’s bio:

Marco Di Renzo (Fellow, IEEE) received the Laurea (cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of L’Aquila, Italy, in 2003 and 2007, respectively, and the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (Doctor of Science) degree from University Paris-Sud (currently Paris-Saclay University), France, in 2013. Currently, he is a CNRS Research Director (Professor) and the Head of the Intelligent Physical Communications group in the Laboratory of Signals and Systems (L2S) at Paris-Saclay University – CNRS and CentraleSupelec, Paris, France. Also, he is an elected member of the L2S Board Council and a member of the L2S Management Committee, and is a Member of the Admission and Evaluation Committee of the Ph.D. School on Information and Communication Technologies, Paris-Saclay University. He is a Founding Member and the Academic Vice Chair of the Industry Specification Group (ISG) on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), where he served as the Rapporteur for the work item on communication models, channel models, and evaluation methodologies. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, IET, and AAIA; an Ordinary Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, an Ordinary Member of the Academia Europaea; and a Highly Cited Researcher. Also, he holds the 2023 France-Nokia Chair of Excellence in ICT, and was a Fulbright Fellow at City University of New York (USA), a Nokia Foundation Visiting Professor (Finland), and a Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Fellow (UK). His recent research awards include the 2021 EURASIP Best Paper Award, the 2022 IEEE COMSOC Outstanding Paper Award, the 2022 Michel Monpetit Prize conferred by the French Academy of Sciences, the 2023 EURASIP Best Paper Award, the 2023 IEEE ICC Best Paper Award, the 2023 IEEE COMSOC Fred W. Ellersick Prize, the 2023 IEEE COMSOC Heinrich Hertz Award, the 2023 IEEE VTS James Evans Avant Garde Award, and the 2023 IEEE COMSOC Technical Recognition Award from the Signal Processing and Computing for Communications Technical Committee. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Communications Letters during the period 2019-2023, and he is now serving in the Advisory Board. In 2024-2025, he will be serving as a Voting Member of the Fellow Evaluation Standing Committee and as the Director of Journals of the IEEE Communications Society.