Multi-Beam Steering for 6G Communications Based on Graphene Metasurfaces.

Huifang Ai,Zhongyi Guo,Wei Wang,Qianlong Kang,Kai Guo

doi:10.3390/s21144784

Huifang Ai, Zhongyi Guo + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s21144784

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Abstract

As communication technology is entering the 6G era, a great demand for high-performance devices operating in the terahertz (THz) band has emerged. As an important part of 6G technology, indoor communication requires multi-beam steering and tracking to serve multi-users. In this paper, we have designed a graphene metasurface that can realize multi-beam steering for directional radiations. The designed metasurface consists of graphene ribbons, dielectric spacer, and metal substrate. By designing the graphene ribbons and controlling the applied voltage on them, we have obtained single-, double-, and triple-beam steering. In addition, we have also numerically calculated the far-field distributions of the steered multi-beam with a diffraction distance of 2 m. Our design has potential applications in future indoor directional 6G communications.

Highlights

Future 6G wireless communication systems have already attracted tremendous attention [1,2]
It has been demonstrated that metasurface could be one of the key technologies for the 6G wireless communication systems, such as massive multiple input multiple output technology and smart radio environments [29,30,31]
By studying the near-field distributions and far-field radiation patterns of the multi-beam steering, we demonstrated that our metasurfaces have excellent performances of anomalous multi-beam steering

Summary

Introduction

Future 6G wireless communication systems have already attracted tremendous attention [1,2]. There have been several different techniques previously employed to develop multi-beam patterns in different spectra, involving the use of phased array antennas [7,8], graded metamaterials based on transformation optics [9,10], and metasurfaces [11,12,13]. By providing abrupt geometric or resonant phase discontinuities, the metasurfaces can achieve control of the beam wavefront [21,22,23,24] They can steer reflected or transmitted light to an arbitrary anomalous angle, the angle of reflection or transmission can be calculated by using the generalized Snell’s law [25,26,27,28]. A dynamically tunable multi-beam control device based on metasurface can be designed to improve the coverage performance in multi-terminated terahertz communications by studying the beam propagation

Methods

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion