Holographic MIMO Surfaces for 6G Wireless Networks: Opportunities, Challenges, and Trends

Future wireless networks are expected to evolve towards an intelligent and software reconfigurable functionality paradigm enabling ubiquitous communication between humans and mobile devices, but also being capable of sensing, controlling, and optimizing the wireless environment to fulfill the visions of low powered, high throughput, massive connectivity, and low latency communications. A key conceptual enabler that is recently gaining increasing popularity is the Holographic Multiple Input Multiple Output Surface (HMIMOS) that refers to a low cost transformative wireless planar structure comprising of sub-wavelength metallic or dielectric scattering particles, which is capable of impacting electromagnetic waves according to desired objectives. In this article, we provide an overview of HMIMOS communications by introducing the available hardware architectures for reconfigurable metasurfaces and their main characteristics, as well as highlighting the opportunities and key design challenges when multiple HMIMOS are considered.