Designing Smart Electromagnetic Environments for Next-Generation Wireless Communications

The design of a smart electromagnetic (EM) environment for next-generation wireless communication systems is addressed in this work. The proposed approach aims at synthesizing a desired EM field distribution over a target region, where the receiving terminals are located, through the opportunistic exploitation of the complex scattering interactions between the EM field generated by a reconfigurable primary source and the objects/scatterers present in the environment, which behave as application-driven passive metastructures. The effectiveness and the potentialities of the proposed design methodology are assessed with a proof-of-concept numerical result obtained by means of advanced and reliable simulation tools.