Smart EM Environments: Current Trends and Future Perspectives

The smart electromagnetic environment (SEE) is a rapidly evolving paradigm aiming at revolutionizing the design of next-generation mobile communication systems. It is founded on the main idea that the propagation scenario should be no more regarded as an impairment to the overall system performance, but rather as a powerful additional degree-of-freedom (DoF) for tailoring the complex EM propagation phenomena towards an enhanced quality-of-service (QoS). Current trends and future perspectives of such an emerging framework are discussed to provide an overview of the most recent advancements in this field as well as to identify open challenges and promising future tracks of research.