Intelligent Time-Varying Metasurface Transceiver for Index Modulation in 6G Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel reconfigurable intelligent metasurface transceiver for 6G networks that implements various index modulation techniques, demonstrating improved bit error rates through electromagnetic simulations and experiments.

Contribution

It presents electromagnetics-compliant designs of specific index modulation schemes using a space-time-modulated metasurface for 6G MIMO systems, which was not previously explored.

Findings

Programmable reflection phase and frequency harmonic generation demonstrated

Electromagnetic simulations confirm design feasibility

Bit error rate for proposed IM methods is lower than conventional MIMO-OFDM

Abstract

Index modulation (IM) is one of the candidate technologies for the upcoming sixth generation (6G) wireless communications networks. In this paper, we propose a space-time-modulated reconfigurable intelligent metasurface (RI-MTS) that is configured to implement various frequency-domain IM techniques in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) array configuration. Unlike prior works which mostly analyze signal theory of general RI-MTS IM, we present novel electromagnetics-compliant designs of specific IMs such as sub-carrier index modulation (SIM) and MIMO orthogonal frequency-domain modulation IM (MIMO-OFDM-IM). Our full-wave electromagnetic simulations and analytical computations establish the programmable ability of these transceivers to vary the reflection phase and generate frequency harmonics for IM. Our experiments for bit error rate show that RI-MTS-based SIM and MIMO-OFDM-IM are lower than conventional MIMO-OFDM.