Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Wireless Communications: An Outlook On Opportunities and Challenges

Speaker: Lina Mohjazi, Lecturer, University of Glasgow

The 5G mobile networks are envisaged to enable a plethora of breakthrough advancements in wireless technologies, providing support of a diverse set of services over a single platform. While the deployment of 5G systems is scaling up globally, it is time to look ahead for beyond 5G systems. This is mainly driven by the emerging societal trends, calling for fully automated systems and intelligent services supported by extended reality and haptics communications. To accommodate the stringent requirements of their prospective applications, which are data-driven and defined by extremely low-latency, ultra-reliable, fast and seamless wireless connectivity, research initiatives are currently focusing on a progressive roadmap towards 6G networks, which are expected to bring transformative changes to this premise. In this presentation, I will shed light on one of the major enabling technology for 6G, called reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), which are expected to revolutionize the fundamental architectures of wireless communication networks. Recent advances in RIS offer a paradigm shift from uncontrollable to fully tunable and customizable wireless propagation environments, enabling a plethora of new applications and technological trends. In this talk, an overview of RIS will be presented and their associated challenges and open research directions will be discussed