NR-Surface: NextG-ready µW-reconfigurable mmWave Metasurface

Metasurface has recently emerged as an economic solution to expand mmWave coverage. However, their pervasive deployment remains a challenge, mainly due to the difficulty in reaching the tight 260ns NR synchronization requirement and real-time wireless reconfiguration while maintaining multi-year battery life. This paper presents NR-Surface, the first real-time reconfigurable metasurface fully compliant with the NR standard, operating at 242.7 µW for a 2.1-year lifetime on an AA battery. NR-Surface incorporates (i) a new extremely low-power (14KHz sampling) reconfiguration interface, NarrowBand Packet Unit (NBPU), for synchronization and real-time reconfiguration, and (ii) a highly responsive and low-leakage metasurface designed for low-duty cycled operation, by carefully leveraging the structure and the periodicity of the NR beam management procedure in the NR standard. NR-Surface is prototyped and evaluated end-to-end with NR BS built on srsRAN to demonstrate diverse usage scenarios including multiple NR-Surface per BS, multiple UE per NR-Surface, and 3D beamforming. Around-the-corner UE evaluations showcase NR-Surface efficacy under different user mobility patterns (20.3dB gain) and dynamic blockage (22.2dB gain).