Towards a Smart EM Environment - Challenges, Opportunities, and Trends

The Smart ElectroMagnetic Environment (SEME) is a disruptive paradigm aimed to revolutionize the design of future wireless systems and infrastructures. Some of the most relevant challenges, opportunities, and trends within such a rapidly emerging framework are discussed in this work. Towards this end, recent SEME implementations including numerial and experimental results are surveyed and discussed, highlighting the SEME key features and potentialities as well as envisaging the necessary next steps in such research area.