Abstract

Recent speculations for the upcoming 6G push the 5G performance indicators to unprecedented levels, envisioning THz frequency bands, devices with embedded sensing capabilities, and native artificial intelligence. These challenging features are expected to become a reality around 2030 and with a strong green footprint. In this talk, we will elaborate around the emerging technology of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces which is provisioned as the enabler of smart wireless environments, offering a highly scalable, low-cost, hardware-efficient, and almost energy-neutral solution for the dynamic control of the propagation of electromagnetic signals, as well as, very recently, their transmission and reception. We will discuss their evolution from programmable reflecting metamaterials to connected computational- and power-autonomous hybrid metasurfaces as well as metasurface-based holographic MIMO transceivers, emphasising on their state of-the-art configuration approaches and their imminent applications for communications, localisation, sensing, and their integration