Mentor's Musings on the Potential, Challenges and Opportunities of Ris to Enable and Empower the xG Evolution

While 5G is still in its commercialization phase, the research on sixth generation (6G) communication has already started ground work on innovative technologies that can support the capacity growth of future networks with Lower - Cost, Energy Consumption, and Hardware Complexity. In this regard, a new concept of Smart Radio Environments (SREs) has emerged, with the capability to tune the propagation channel according to the use case application. In order to realize the SREs, a disruptive technology - Recon-figurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS), also called Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRS), has attracted the research & design community. RISs are envisioned to be capable of transforming the dumb wireless environment into an intelligent and smart space that can play an active role in improving the quality-of-service (QoS) and connectivity.