Holographic MIMO Surfaces for 6G Wireless Networks: Opportunities, Challenges, and Trends

TL;DR

This paper reviews the emerging use of Holographic MIMO Surfaces (HMIMOS) in 6G wireless networks, discussing hardware architectures, opportunities, and challenges for reconfigurable metasurfaces to enhance wireless communication and environment control.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of HMIMOS hardware architectures, their characteristics, and discusses the opportunities and challenges in implementing HMIMOS for future wireless networks.

Findings

HMIMOS can significantly improve wireless communication performance.

Reconfigurable metasurfaces enable dynamic control of electromagnetic waves.

Design challenges include hardware complexity and environmental robustness.

Abstract

Future wireless networks are expected to evolve towards an intelligent and software reconfigurable paradigm enabling ubiquitous communications between humans and mobile devices. They will be also capable of sensing, controlling, and optimizing the wireless environment to fulfill the visions of low-power, high-throughput, massively-connected, and low-latency communications. A key conceptual enabler that is recently gaining increasing popularity is the Holographic Multiple Input Multiple Output Surface (HMIMOS) that refers to a low-cost transformative wireless planar structure comprising of sub-wavelength metallic or dielectric scattering particles, which is capable of impacting electromagnetic waves according to desired objectives. In this article, we provide an overview of HMIMOS communications by introducing the available hardware architectures for reconfigurable such metasurfaces and their main characteristics, as well as highlighting the opportunities and key challenges in designing HMIMOS-enabled communications.