Keynote Talk #2: 6G Wireless: Wireless Networks Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

Future wireless networks are expected be more than allowing people, mobile devices, and objects to communicate with each other. Future wireless networks will constitute a distributed intelligent communications, sensing, and computing platform. Small cells, Massive MIMO, millimeter-wave communications are three fundamental approaches to meet the requirements of 5G wireless networks. Their advantages are undeniable. The question is, however, whether these technologies will be sufficient to meet the requirements of future wireless networks that integrate communications, sensing, and computing in a single platform. Wireless networks, in addition, are rapidly evolving towards a software-defined design paradigm, where every part of the network can be configured and controlled via software. In this optimization process, however, the wireless environment remains an uncontrollable factor: It remains unaware of the communication process undergoing within it. Apart from being uncontrollable, the environment has a negative effect on the communication efficiency: signal attenuation limits the network connectivity, multi-path propagation results in fading phenomena, reflections and refractions from objects are a source of uncontrollable interference. In the recent period, a brand-new technology, which is referred to as Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs), was brought to the attention of the wireless community. The wireless future that can be envisioned by using this technology consists of coating every environmental object with man-made reconfigurable surfaces of electromagnetic material (software-defined reconfigurable metasurfaces) that are electronically controlled with integrated electronics and wireless communications. In contrast to any other technology currently being used in wireless networks, the distinctive characteristic of the RISs consists of making the environment fully controllable by the telecommunication operators, by allowing them to shape and control the electromagnetic response of the objects distributed throughout the network. The RISs are a promising but little understood technology that has the potential of fundamentally changing how wireless networks are designed today. In this talk, we will discuss the potential of RIS in 6G wireless networks.