Beamsteering for 5G Mobile Communication Using Programmable Metasurface

The usage of programmable metasurfaces (PMs) offers a promising way to realize flexible and fully electronic beam steering. Compared to phased arrays, PMs are particularly attractive due to their potential as a cost-effective base station in wireless communication systems, effectively reducing power consumption and total system costs. Although PM has been a hot topic, development of its real-time implementations are rarely touched. In this letter, an experimental mobile communication system with user tracking based on PM beamforming at 28 GHz is proposed and implemented. Thereby, beam management algorithms comparable to the 3GPP 5G NR standards are used. Experiments show that the system performs precise tracking with an angle mismatch from 0.5° to 2.5°, and minimizes the beam training overhead through flexible beam refinement. Experiments also show that the tracking of a mobile user with a maximum angular speed of 37.5°/s can be realized in the established system.