M.Sc. Li Yueheng

In practical wireless communication environments, the line-of-sight (LoS) path between the transmitter and receiver is not always available. This happens commonly in the city with plenty of buildings. This leads to the usage of reflection paths but with large degradation due to the additional loss caused by the scattering and absorbing effects of the building surface.

The authors in [1] came up with the idea of using a metasurface as a relay system for the reflection path. In this case, the power illuminating to the building surface will be gathered by the metasurface with a reconfigurable beamforming direction. In the end, the received signal quality is improved, and algorithms like channel estimation and user tracking become available.

Working steps and challenges:

1. Understanding the basic concepts of the metasurface relay system.
2. Investigate and analyze the beamforming quality of the metasurface under relay environment.
3. Build up the entire system and analyze the entire system performance.
4. Replace the transmit antenna to be a phased array and compare with the former system performance.
5. Further implementation of communication algorithms like channel estimation and user tracking.

Preferable basic knowledge:

1. Communication technology background such as beamforming system, digital signal processing and basics of radio frequency system.
2. Familiar usage of Matlab, basics of Python or C++ program basics.
3. Interest of hardware measurements and patience of solve practical troubles.
4. Some mathematic formulations may be required in this work.

 (2019).