Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: From Electromagnetics to Programmable Wireless Environments

Marco Di Renzo received the Laurea (cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of L'Aquila, Italy, in 2003 and 2007, respectively, and the Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (Doctor of Science) degree from University Paris-Sud, France, in 2013. Since 2010, he has been with the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), where he is a CNRS Research Director (CNRS Professor) in the Laboratory of Signals and Systems (L2S) of Paris-Saclay University – CNRS and CentraleSupelec, Paris, France. In Paris-Saclay University, he serves as the Coordinator of the Communications and Networks Research Area of the Laboratory of Excellence DigiCosme, and as a member of the Admission and Evaluation Committee of the Ph.D. School on Information and Communication Technologies. Currently, he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Communications Letters, and is a Distinguished Speaker of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society. In 2017-2020, he was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society and IEEE Communications Society. Also, he served as an Editor and the Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Communications Letters, and as an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Communications and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. Currently, he serves as the Founding Chair of the Special Interest Group on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces of the Wireless Technical Committee of the IEEE Communications Society, and is the Founding Lead Editor of the IEEE Communications Society Best Readings in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces. He is a Highly Cited Researcher (Clarivate Analytics, 2019), a World’s Top 2% Scientist from Stanford University (2020), a Fellow of the IEEE (2020), and a Fellow of the IET (2020). He has received several individual distinctions and research awards, which include the IEEE Communications Society Best Young Researcher Award for Europe, Middle East and Africa, the Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Fellowship, the IEEE Jack Neubauer Memorial Best System Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Young Professional in Academia Award, the SEE-IEEE Alain Glavieux Award, and a 2019 IEEE ICC Best Paper Award. In 2019, he was a recipient of a Nokia Foundation Visiting Professorship for conducting research on metamaterial-assisted wireless communications at Aalto University, Finland.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have recently emerged as the new wireless communication research frontier with the goal of realizing metamaterial-coated smart and reconfigurable radio propagation environments via passive and tunable signal transformations. Featured by orders of magnitude lower hardware and energy cost than traditional active antenna-arrays and yet superior performance, RISs are the new driving technology for future wireless networks, especially for enabling them to migrate to higher frequency bands. RISs have the inherent potential of fundamentally transforming the current wireless network with active nodes solely into a new hybrid network comprising active and passive components co-working in an intelligent way, so as to achieve a sustainable capacity growth with a low and affordable cost and power consumption. Therefore, RISs have the potential to change how wireless networks are currently designed, usher in that hoped-for wireless future, and are regarded as an enabling technology for realizing the emerging concept of metamaterial-assisted smart radio environments (SREs). RIS-assisted SREs are a multidisciplinary research endeavor but are not well-understood. In this talk, I will introduce the state of the art, the research challenges, and some recent research results at the crossroad of wireless communications, electromagnetics, physics, and metamaterials. Source: arXiv:2004.09352, arXiv:2009.02694 and arXiv:2011.14373.