NextG-reconfigurable low-power mmWave metasurface

Abstract

5G communication support mmWave communication named FR2, which is expected to achieve high data rate and massive communication by utilizing the wide bandwidth. However, it is barely used in practice since the inherent mmWave properties(i.e. high attenuation, low penetration rate, short coverage) require a high number of FR2 BS per unit area, which make high initial and management cost. To reduce the deployment cost, recent works studies metasurface, which increases the coverage of mmWave at a low cost. In this paper, we propose the first metasurface which is compatible with existing infrastructure and supports a long lifetime with low power consumption, and low-cost production. We satisfy these properties by transmitting a control signal which has advantages for low power decoding, and by designing a low power controller which utilizes the low power element (such as nonlinearity). Especially, our low power metasurface does not require any hardware modification of existing devices, which makes lower deployment costs possible. Also, our metasurface reduces additional power consumption with a low duty cycle which is compatible with the NR beam management protocol. As the result, we achieve 259$\mu W$ power consumption which makes 1.33 years lifetime with one coin cell battery. Also, We find that in real-life environments, up to 22.9 dB of SNR gain can be achieved.