The Road to Smart Electromagnetic Environments: The Future of Wireless Communications

The Smart Electromagnetic Environment (SEME) is a revolutionary paradigm that will definitely change how a wireless communication system is nowadays conceived, designed, and deployed. It is based on the driving idea that the propagation environment must play a key-role in enhancing the overall quality-of-service (QoS) in order to meet the ever-growing needs for ubiquitous connection, extreme throughputs, and high reliability foreseen in the next generation communications standards. The goal of this work is to provide a review of some of the most recent advances in such a very active research field.