As we all know, current Wi-Fi sesning systems exist many open issues, such as bad performance in NLoS and multi-user scenarios. Recently, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS), as known as a promising technique in 6G communication, brings us new capabilities and is promising to make RF sensing systems more practical and robust.

A Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS), also known as an Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS), comprises an array of reflected antenna elements, each of which can independently incur some change to the incident signal. The rising of RIS provides us many potential solutions to solve these open issues. We propose that RIS can support three new capabilities to current Wi-Fi sensing systems. First, RIS provides a new and controllable transmission path to bypass obstacles. Second, it can also concentrate the wireless energy reflected by RIS to certain regions of interest (ROI). Third, RIS can proactively change the wireless environment, which makes it useful for attack applications.

Related publications:

• [SenSys ’23] Chenggao LI, Qianyi HUANG, Yuxuan ZHOU, Yandao HUANG, Qingyong HU, Huangxun CHEN and Qian Zhang, “RIScan: RIS-aided Multi-user Indoor Localization Using COTS Wi-Fi.” Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. 2023.

• [SenSys ’23] Yuxuan ZHOU, Chenggao LI, Huangxun CHEN and Qian Zhang, “RIStealth: Practical and Covert Physical-Layer Attack against WiFi-based Intrusion Detection via Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface.” Proceedings of the 21st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems. 2023.