User Tracking and Wireless Digital Transmission through a Programmable Metasurface

Abstract User tracking has been an important aspect in wireless communications. Commonly, distributed apertures such as array antennas or multiple sensors are needed in wireless communication systems to achieve spatial resolutions for user tracking. Here it is proposed to realize the user tracking and wireless digital transmission simultaneously by using a single metasurface aperture. The reflection‐type metasurface consists of many subwavelength binary reconfigurable units. By programming these binary units, the metasurface can steer waves radiated from a horn antenna to a specified direction with different digital radiation phases. With this function, the metasurface can track the users by steering directional beams and transmit phase‐modulated digital signals through the directional beams. A prototype based on a programmable metasurface is developed and experiments in terms of cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and constellation diagrams are performed. The measured results prove that the user tracking and wireless digital transmission can be integrated through the programmable metasurface. Considering the simple architecture and flexible controlling features, the proposed methodology has great application prospect in integrated radar‐communication systems and cognitive electronic systems.