META WIRELESS - ITN

MetaWireless puts forth the disruptive idea to design wireless networks by treating the wireless environment as an optimization variable to be adapted to maximize the network performance. But how to implement this vision? How to modify in real-time the propagation properties of the environment between two communicating devices? The answer lies in realizing reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), incorporating them into 6G wireless networks. To succeed, this vision needs to advance and merge the inter-disciplinary fields of wireless communications, physics, electromagnetic meta-surfaces, computational learning, software networks that have never been combined before. MetaWireless will lay the theoretical, algorithmic, and architectural foundation of RIS-enabled future wireless networks, and will develop the first open access system-level simulator for network optimization. The above overall objective is decomposed into the following four research objectives of MetaWireless: Objective 1 – Developing RISs. Bring to light the third generation of meta-materials technology by developing RISs that can be reconfigured in real-time and are able to perform joint communication and sensing tasks. Objective 2 – Theoretical frameworks. Develop new mathematical techniques to introduce a novel communication theory that overcomes conventional Shannon’s theory and unveils the ultimate performance of RIS-based networks. Objective 3 – Algorithmic frameworks. Develop new communication schemes, optimization protocols, and algorithms for RIS-based networks, coping with the large degrees of freedom and the passive nature of RISs. Objective 4 – System-level simulator. Develop RIS-tailored ray tracing modules and build the first open access simulation (software) platform to analyze, optimize, and test large-scale RIS-based intelligent radio environments.