TY - JOUR
TI - Reconfigurable, Intelligent, and Sustainable Wireless Environments for
6G Smart Connectivity
AU - Strinati, Emilio Calvanese
AU - Alexandropoulos, George C.
AU - Wymeersch,
AU - Henk
AU - Denis, Benoit
AU - Sciancalepore, Vincenzo
AU - D'Errico,
AU - Raffaele
AU - Clemente, Antonio
AU - Phan-Huy, Dinh-Thuy
AU - De Carvalho,
AU - Elisabeth
AU - Popovski, Petar
JO - IEEE Communications Magazine
PY - 2021
VL - 59
TODO - 10
SP - 99-105
PB - IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
SN - 0163-6804, 1558-1896
TODO - 10.1109/MCOM.001.2100070
TODO - null
TODO - Various visions of the forthcoming sixth generation (6G) networks point
toward flexible connect-and-compute technologies to support future
innovative services and the corresponding use cases. 6G should be able
to accommodate ever evolving and heterogeneous applications, future
regulations, and diverse user-, service-, and location-based
requirements. A key element toward building smart and energy sustainable
wireless systems beyond 5G is the reconfigurable intelligent surface
(RIS), which offers programmable control and shaping of the wireless
propagation environment. Capitalizing on this technology potential, in
this article we introduce two new concepts: i) wireless environment as a
service, which leverages a novel RIS-empowered networking paradigm to
trade off diverse, and usually conflicting, connectivity objectives; and
ii) performance-boosted areas enabled by RIS-based connectivity,
representing competing service provisioning areas that are highly
spatially and temporally focused. We discuss the key technological
enablers and research challenges with the proposed networking paradigm,
and highlight the potential profound role of RISs in the recent Open
Radio Access Network architecture.
ER -