SURFER | SUrface waves in smart Radio Frequency EnviRonments

Summary
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as the new wireless communication research frontier with the goal of realizing smart and reconfigurable radio propagation environments via passive and tunable signal transformations. Featured by orders-of-magnitude lower hardware and energy cost than traditional active arrays and yet superior performance, RISs are the new driving technology for future 6G wireless networks, especially for enabling them to migrate to higher frequency bands. RISs will fundamentally transform today’s wireless networks with active nodes solely to a new hybrid network comprising active and passive components co-working in an intelligent way, so as to achieve a sustainable capacity growth with low and affordable cost and power consumption. Current wireless networks based on RISs are, however, based on the free-space communication (FSC) paradigm: The radio waves occupy the entire space, naturally propagate in all directions, and are reflected, refracted, and scattered after hitting objects.

In contrast with FSC-based RISs, an emerging technology for enabling reliable, energy-efficient, and interference-free communications in indoor environments is surface wave communication (SWC). Surface waves glide at the interface of materials and their propagation is inherently confined on their surface. Compared with FSC, the unique advantages of SWC are a much more favorable pathloss, a much easier interference management, and an inherent low probability of intercept if appropriate anti-wiretapping schemes are used, since the radio waves propagate along surfaces without leaving them and creating unwanted interference.

Supervised and trained by a team of five internationally renowned researchers from academia and industry, Surfer’s experienced researcher aims to pioneer the theoretic foundation and experimental validation of SWC for indoor communications and to unveil its ultimate performance limits, optimized design, and integration with FSC.
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More information & hyperlinks
Web resources: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101030536
Start date: 01-03-2022
End date: 10-03-2024
Total budget - Public funding: 184 707,84 Euro - 184 707,00 Euro
Cordis data

Original description

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as the new wireless communication research frontier with the goal of realizing smart and reconfigurable radio propagation environments via passive and tunable signal transformations. Featured by orders-of-magnitude lower hardware and energy cost than traditional active arrays and yet superior performance, RISs are the new driving technology for future 6G wireless networks, especially for enabling them to migrate to higher frequency bands. RISs will fundamentally transform today’s wireless networks with active nodes solely to a new hybrid network comprising active and passive components co-working in an intelligent way, so as to achieve a sustainable capacity growth with low and affordable cost and power consumption. Current wireless networks based on RISs are, however, based on the free-space communication (FSC) paradigm: The radio waves occupy the entire space, naturally propagate in all directions, and are reflected, refracted, and scattered after hitting objects.

In contrast with FSC-based RISs, an emerging technology for enabling reliable, energy-efficient, and interference-free communications in indoor environments is surface wave communication (SWC). Surface waves glide at the interface of materials and their propagation is inherently confined on their surface. Compared with FSC, the unique advantages of SWC are a much more favorable pathloss, a much easier interference management, and an inherent low probability of intercept if appropriate anti-wiretapping schemes are used, since the radio waves propagate along surfaces without leaving them and creating unwanted interference.

Supervised and trained by a team of five internationally renowned researchers from academia and industry, Surfer’s experienced researcher aims to pioneer the theoretic foundation and experimental validation of SWC for indoor communications and to unveil its ultimate performance limits, optimized design, and integration with FSC.

Status

TERMINATED

Call topic

MSCA-IF-2020

Update Date

28-04-2024
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Horizon 2020
H2020-EU.1. EXCELLENT SCIENCE
H2020-EU.1.3. EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
H2020-EU.1.3.2. Nurturing excellence by means of cross-border and cross-sector mobility
H2020-MSCA-IF-2020
MSCA-IF-2020 Individual Fellowships