HERA: A Novel Heuristic Resource Allocator for Multi-SDM Multi-User Settings

The advent of Programmable Wireless Environments (PWEs) has transformed the wireless propagation phenomenon into a software-defined resource, leveraging Software-defined metasurfaces (SDMs). These new technologies have shown that wireless waves can be routed within a space, contrary to the regular, chaotic wireless propagation, yielding considerable benefits to communication efficiency, and even completely new applications. A new topic has risen, in the context of modeling these capabilities as network resources, and allocating them to users. In this context, the present paper contributes HERA, a heuristic resource allocator that receives a setup with users and SDMs as input, and produces the necessary configuration of the latter, for efficient shared performance. Simulation results demonstrate considerable efficiency in this task, while the heuristic nature of HERA sets the basis for a flexible definition of complex user objectives in the future.