ECCS-EPSRC: Towards Quantum-assisted Reconfigurable Indoor Wireless Environments

Indoor scenario has emerged as one of the most congested, contested, and competitive wireless environments. With the need of resilient Internet of Everything (IoE) and Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0) infrastructures, thousands of devices are expected to be connected wirelessly within a confined indoor environment, interfering with each other and contending for limited electromagnetic spectrum.

The combination of growing demand for data traffic, confined space, and congested spectrum creates a major technical challenge and opportunities for innovation. The research objective of this project is to investigate new fundamental communication models and schemes, which dynamically program and customize indoor wireless propagation environments for enhanced wireless communications.

This objective is attained by integrating the physics of wave-chaotic dynamics, the mathematics of random matrix theory, the engineering of reconfigurable electromagnetic surfaces, and the computing power of quantum hardware. The success will open new pathways from compensation to exploitation of chaos and randomness towards more energy-efficient and intelligent indoor wireless communications.

The research has the potential to support a variety of highly desirable functionalities for beyond-5G/6G indoor wireless infrastructure, such as maximum signal deposition at desired locations, energy and bandwidth efficient indoor wireless communications, accurate and reliable indoor positioning. While the project is focused on electrodynamics, the methodology developed by this research can be applied to many other related fields including acoustics, quantum mesoscopic transport, imaging in complex media, and light scattering in disordered media.

Indoor wireless is qualitatively different than outdoor wireless. The inherently complex, dynamic interaction between wireless devices and radio environment presents its own unique challenges. This project will investigate a physics-oriented, mathematically tractable computational framework that can enable statistical design and optimization of deliberate perturbations to dynamically program and customize indoor wireless propagation environments.

The perturbative force is realized by the emerging reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) technology. The optimization procedure operates on the physical degrees of freedom that are accessible in the prescribed perturbation. To enable an ultra-fast optimization adapting to dynamic wireless environments, the research will leverage the power of quantum adiabatic optimizer to overcome the computational complexity.

The proposed research consists of three components: (1) a rigorous mathematical model for the statistical analysis of wave physics in complex confined indoor environment; (2) the configuration and control of wave chaos using the RIS technology; (3) quantum-enabled, ultra-fast large-scale optimization of RIS configuration. The proposal’s vision is that the physics of complex systems fused with quantum computing will constitute a game changer for the modeling and design of large network of RIS devices cooperating to transform indoor radio environments into a resource for future wireless networks.

This project was submitted through the NSF Engineering - UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Lead Agency Opportunity (ENG-EPSRC), a collaborative partnership between the National Science Foundation and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.