A Reconfigurable Metasurface Enhancing Signal Coverage for Wireless Communication Using Reduced Numbers of p-i-n Diodes

This article proposes a reflective reconfigurable metasurface design that can reduce the number of p-i-n diodes required by up to 60% for enhancing wireless communication signal coverage. The metasurface is also optimized from two aspects of element and array and can achieve enhanced signal coverage in a variety of regions, which proposes a low-cost general-purpose scheme and device. The reconfigurable element with a relative bandwidth of 8.2% is designed in a “subarray” form to reduce the p-i-n diode loading by half, and the array is sparsely designed, resulting in a further reduction of 20%. The genetic algorithm (GA) optimization method suitable for the digital coding metasurface is proposed to optimize the element’s phase discretization scheme and the array’s sparse method. The proposed metasurface is loaded in familiar T-shaped corridor models, and the coverage enhancement is verified based on the co-simulation of different software, showing the device can be applied in different scenes. For the first time, systematic measurement in a realistic environment using a reconfigurable metasurface with a reduced number of p-i-n diodes is performed, which proves that it can achieve signal coverage improvement in the corridor and in the actual 5G communication environment. The results indicate that this design greatly reduces system complexity and cost, which can be compatible with existing communication optimization methods, providing a practical, scalable scheme and device for enhancing signal coverage in various scenes.