Description du projet
Ouvrir la voie à une nouvelle génération de connectivité
Les réseaux sans fil ont évolué de façon extraordinaire, de la découverte des ondes radio en 1880 aux réseaux 5G du 21e siècle. De nos jours, la connectivité sans fil, des télécommunications mobiles et Wi-Fi aux communications Bluetooth et de l’IdO, ne cesse de s’étendre et d’évoluer. Le projet META WIRELESS, financé par l’UE, participe à ouvrir la voie aux réseaux 6G et au-delà. Pour répondre aux exigences des futurs réseaux sans fil, le projet considérera l’environnement comme une variable à contrôler et à optimiser. Il intégrera des surfaces intelligentes reconfigurables pour permettre la manipulation de l’environnement sans fil. Fabriquées à partir de méta-matériaux électromagnétiques discontinus, ces surfaces sont des structures planes susceptibles d’être utilisées pour modifier la phase et le front d’onde des ondes radioélectriques incidentes.
Objectif
Wireless connectivity has become a pillar of our society. The growth of wireless traffic is relentless, forecast to reach a staggering worldwide aggregate of 5,016 exabytes by 2030, along with bit rates of 1 Tb/s and new services related to sensing, localization, low-latency, and ultra-reliability.
While the performance of wireless networks has improved phenomenally over the last decades, progress is by now pushing against fundamental limits and the mechanisms that have sustained these huge improvements are starting to falter. New evolutionary leaps are called for in order to ensure that the aforementioned forecasts can become a reality.
To date, every wireless system has abided by the premise that the propagation radio channel is fixed by nature and cannot be tampered with, but only compensated through ever more sophisticated transmission/reception schemes. A potential evolutionary leap for 6G-and-beyond networks is to break free from the postulate that channels are uncontrollable factors. Serving such a vision, META WIRELESS pursues the disruptive idea of designing wireless networks by treating the environment itself as a quantity to be controlled and optimized. Precisely, the manipulation of the wireless environment can be made possible by incorporating reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. These are planar structures, made of meta-materials and electromagnetically discontinuous, which do not adhere to conventional reflection and diffraction laws; rather, they can modify in a controllable fashion the phase and wavefront of impinging radio waves. If deployed to coat objects, walls, or building facades, they could allow customizing in real time the electromagnetic response of environments.
Making this vision a reality requires the training of a new generation of researchers and a multidisciplinary effort involving wireless communications, physics, electromagnetic theory, and computational learning, which are the ingredients that define the META WIRELESS project.
Champ scientifique
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Régime de financement
MSCA-ITN - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks (ITN)Coordinateur
43124 Parma
Italie
L’entreprise s’est définie comme une PME (petite et moyenne entreprise) au moment de la signature de la convention de subvention.