Experimental demonstration of a mmWave passive access point extender based on a binary reconfigurable intelligent surface

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a 28 GHz reconfigurable intelligent surface using off-the-shelf components to extend mmWave wireless coverage in non-line-of-sight conditions, showing practical real-time beamforming capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a binary tunable metasurface at 28 GHz built with standard PCB and PIN diodes, and experimentally validates its use as a passive access point extender in real-world conditions.

Findings

Successful 10-meter non-line-of-sight wireless link

Real-time beamforming with reconfigurable metasurface

Practical implementation using off-the-shelf components

Abstract

As data rates demands are exploding, 5G will soon rely on mmWaves that offer much higher bandwidths. Yet at these frequencies, attenuation and diffraction of waves require point to point communications with beamforming base stations that are complex and power greedy. Furthermore, since any obstacle at these frequencies completely blocks the waves, the networks must be extremely dense, resulting in dramatic increase of its cost. One way to avoid this problem is to redirect beams coming from base stations at many locations with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces, in order to increase their coverage even in cluttered environments. Here we describe and experimentally demonstrate a binary tunable metasurface operating at 28~GHz, based on standard PCB and off the shelves PIN diodes. We show that it can be used as a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface that beamforms an incoming plane wave at a given angle to one or several outgoing plane waves at angles reconfigurable in real time. Most importantly we use this 20~cm$\times$20~cm reconfigurable Intelligent Surface alongside software defined radio and up/down converters at 28~GHz, and demonstrate a wireless link between an emitter and a receiver 10~meters away, in a non line of sight configuration, hence proving the validity of the approach.