MetaRadio: Bridging Wireless Communications Between Real and Virtual Spaces

This article introduces a new concept, MetaRadio, for enabling radios to go beyond traditional radios' physical time and space constraints and form a virtual-real interactive radio system. MetaRadio can connect physical/real space and digital/virtual space to make them grow and evolve together and adapts to dynamic and diversified needs from the whole life cycle of the radio. Specifically, we first present a brief review of radio history, which motivates us to coin the concept of MetaRadio. Then, we describe the unique characteristics of MetaRadio and develop a virtual-real interactive hierarchical framework. Next, we discuss the key enabling technologies. Further, we provide transmitter recognition in an urban environment as a case study to verify the effectiveness of the proposed MetaRadio.