| Title | Metasurface-assisted massive backscatter wireless communication with commodity Wi-Fi signals |
| Authors | Zhao, Hanting Shuang, Ya Wei, Menglin Cui, Tie Jun del Hougne, Philipp Li, Lianlin |
| Affiliation | Peking Univ, Dept Elect, State Key Lab Adv Opt Commun Syst & Networks, Beijing 100871, Peoples R China Southeast Univ, State Key Lab Millimeter Waves, Nanjing 210096, Peoples R China Univ Rennes, CNRS, Inst Elect & Telecommun Rennes IETR, UMR 6164, F-35000 Rennes, France |
| Keywords | MIMO |
| Issue Date | 6-Aug-2020 |
| Publisher | NATURE COMMUNICATIONS |
| Abstract | Conventional wireless communication architecture, a backbone of our modern society, relies on actively generated carrier signals to transfer information, leading to important challenges including limited spectral resources and energy consumption. Backscatter communication systems, on the other hand, modulate an antenna's impedance to encode information into already existing waves but suffer from low data rates and a lack of information security. Here, we introduce the concept of massive backscatter communication which modulates the propagation environment of stray ambient waves with a programmable metasurface. The metasurface's large aperture and huge number of degrees of freedom enable unprecedented wave control and thereby secure and high-speed information transfer. Our prototype leveraging existing commodity 2.4GHz Wi-Fi signals achieves data rates on the order of hundreds of Kbps. Our technique is applicable to all types of wave phenomena and provides a fundamentally new perspective on the role of metasurfaces in future wireless communication. Leveraging the large aperture and huge number of degrees of freedom offered by a programmable metasurface, the authors modulate the propagation environment of existing background commodity Wi-Fi signals to implement a secure and high-speed massive-backscatter communication link. |
| URI | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11897/591249 |
| ISSN | 2041-1723 |
| DOI | 10.1038/s41467-020-17808-y |
| Indexed | SCI(E) |
| Appears in Collections: | 信息科学技术学院 区域光纤通信网与新型光通信系统国家重点实验室 |
